Putting it on the market— A quick guide to publishing a game to the Google Play Store

In this article, I will show you how to publish your game to the Google Play Store.

The first step is to go to the Google Play Console and sign up for a developer account. Fill out the sign-up form and “Click account and pay”, you will be charged a one-off $25 registration fee.

Now we can prepare our game for the store.

In Unity you will want to go to “Edit” > “Project Settings” > “Player” and fill in the Company Name, Product Name, Version, and Default Icon information.

The next step is to set up the Keystore (this is a layer of security Google uses to verify you have permission to work publish/edit this app). This is under Publish Settings in the Player Settings.

Create a new Keystore and save it somewhere secure. Next, we need to save an Alias, so fill out that information as well. You will get a confirmation window.

Now in the “Other Settings” tab, we will need to change some settings to be able to upload to google successfully. Scroll down to the “Configuration” section and check your “Target API Level” at the time of this post it needs to be at least “Android 11.0 (API level 30).

Troubleshoot SDK issues

If you do not have this option you will need to download android studio.

Once you have downloaded android studio you will need to open the application and go to “Tools” > “Open SDK Manager”.

From here you can mark which android SDK versions you want to download then click the apply button to download them. You will get a confirmation window to confirm your download.

Now you have downloaded them click the finish button and then copy the “Android SDK location path” and paste it into your explorer, this will open the SDK file location. Put this window to the side for now.

We are going to paste the folders in the location Unity stores its SDKs. To find this location in Unity click “Edit” > “Preferences” > “External Tools” and under SDK you will see a button “Copy Path”. Click this button and paste it into another explorer window.

This will open up a page like below. Open the “platforms” folder and then copy the android SDK folders from your other window into this one.

We can now change the final settings to prepare your app. Open the Player settings again and scroll down to “Other Settings”. Ensure you have the minimum target API required by Google (currently API Level 30). Next, change your scripting backend from mono to IL2CPP, this allows us to check the ARMv7 and ARM64 checkboxes, this allows us to build in 32 and 64-bit architecture.

Next, create a build by going to “File” > “Build Settings” and clicking build. Make sure to select “Build App Bundle (Google Play)” — this will produce a .aab file to upload to the store.

We can now navigate back over to the google play console and click the create app button.

You will be given a form to fill out about your app. Most of it is quite self-explanatory.

This will open up another page for you to enter information about your app, again fill in the information as required.

After following the prompts google will take your app and place it in a review status. For first-time developers, this can take up to a week before it is approved. You will receive an email once this process has been completed and your app is uploaded.

That's all for now.