Publish Your Game to Google Play- Game Dev Series 117

Objective: create a developer account and publish your game.

The final goal of our mobile game is to publish it to Google Play and make it downloadable to everyone.
In this article, we would active our Google account as a developer and upload our game.

Google Play Console

First, we need to enable the function of Google Play Console. Link to that site and click “Go to Play Console” on the top right.

Now you need to fill in any information needed to be a developer. And also would need to pay a $25 fee to this services.

Once you finished and paid, you can upload your project to Google Play.

Setting your game

Before we upload our game, there are some final setting need to be done.
Back to Unity and open Project Setting. Type in your company name and version, then upload your icon.

Then open the tab of Other Settings. Inside here, you can setting the version and the bundle version code.
It would need to change when you update the game. For example, if your game has update to version 1.1, then the bundle version code should be 2.

Next we need to set the Keystore. A Keystore is an encrypts code to identify you are the author of this game, which is quite important and need to be stored safely.
Open the tab of Publishing Settings and click Keystore Manager.

Inside Keystore Manager, create a new Keystore to a safe folder.

Type in any info it needed and click “add key”.

Once done, it should import the Keystore to your Publishing Setting. Now we can build this game to upload.
Google Play has changed their rule of app uploading from APK to AAB(Android App Bundle). You need to check the “Build App Bundle” in Build Settings window to create a file that could be uploaded to Google Play.

Upload to Google Play

Next, back to Play Console page and click Create app and input any needed information.

On the side menu, select Production and click Create New Release on the top right.

Then upload the AAB file that we just built, and set a version name to it.

After uploaded this, it should take you to the section of Review and Release. If there is any error or mistakes, you might need to solve them all to continue reviewing.
A quick way to fix most of the errors is by going to the bottom of side menu, there is an option called App Content.

You need to run through all these sections to solve the problems, and one of them would be COVID-19 related app confirmation. This cause the main error of my release at the first time.

And the main part would be setting the information of your app page.
Select Main store listing and input all the information of your game. When uploading the app icon and feature graphic, especially notice the size limit of these files. You might need to adjust the size or scale of these graphic.

After this part, if there has any questionnaire or contents confirmation that ask you to finish, just finished them.
All we have to do is to wait for the reviewing.
Once it is done, you should be able to download your game from Google Play.