Learning Unity iOS Game Development

Unity 3D is offered free of charge by Unity Technologies via its website at http://unity3d.com/get-unity.

This page also displays the differences between the professional and free versions.

As of today, the most recent version is 5.0.0. Click on the FREE DOWNLOAD or FROM $75/MONTH button on the web page mentioned before. The current Unity licensing states that if you are a noncommercial entity or make less than $100,000 a year, you are free to use the entire engine without any royalties paid. Due to this reason, I recommend that you use FREE DOWNLOAD. When you click on download, you will get a very small installer. Run this and allow it to download what is needed for the engine. The engine requires 4 GB of HDD space and is about 1.5 GB to download.

Once the download is complete, open the installer. The first window, Download Assistant, will be called. It will ask you what to install. Make sure that you keep Unity 5 checked. You can uncheck Web Player and Standard Assets if you want.

After installing and opening Unity, you will not see any projects. To create one, click on the New Project button in the top-right corner of the Unity window. You can call it anything you desire. At the bottom of the window, there is a selection to change from 3D to 2D. Switch to 2D and click on Create project.

At this point, the editor will open up and give you a blank screen to work with:

We can use the free or nonfree version of a plugin. I will use the paid version called IOS Native.

The reason for me not using the free version called iOS SDK Essentials is that its version has not had any care for a while (at the time of writing this book). This means that there could be general update concerns by the time you are reading this.

To get iOS Native for $20.00 or iOS SDK Essentials, open the Unity Asset Store by clicking on Window and then Unity Asset Store or press Ctrl + 9. With the Asset Store window open, use the top-right search field to find either of these packages. From here, you can either buy and/or download it.

On the App settings page, click on Pricing. You can get here by clicking on My Apps and then opening your game by clicking on its icon.

Pricing is the page where you can choose the initial cost of your application and the territories that will be available.

Availability Date should be the date, in which you will create this application. You can leave it as default for now. In the future, if you want to change the price for something, such as a sale, Availability Date will dictate how long this pricing tier can last.

For my game, it will be free. To set this or any other price, click on the Price Tier drop-down list and select the price.

To use Discount for Educational Institutions, use your own discretion:

The last thing you need to do on this page is click on specific territories at the bottom of the settings page. Everything is defaulted to be selected. If there are any territories you don't wish to have your game available on, click on the checkbox next to it. When done, click on Save at the bottom of the page.

The page should load back to Rights and Pricing and have the Completed box at the top of the page.

First, click on the My Apps drop-down list at the top of the page and select My Apps. Then, click on your game to go back to the settings page.

Next, click on In-App Purchases.

The page will read No In-App Purchases have been set up for this app. To set one up, click on Create New.

Then, click on Non-Consumable.

There are five purchase types:

Reference Name is the name that will be displayed in iTunes Connect and in Sales Trend reports. It is not displayed on the App Store. It's a way for us to have a reference to what it is we will sell when we look at reports.

Name it Remove_Ads with an underscore.

The product ID is a unique ID that is used to report the purchase. Typically, I would name this as gamename.referencename. Generally, this would be written as <<gamename>>.<<referencename>>, which symbolizes that you can put anything between these fields; however, as not all of you are aware that these symbols represent a dynamic field—meaning that it is about the formatting and not the literal text—gamename.referencename is the literal view of how it's inputted.

As I don't know the name of your games and we will both have to use this in the future chapters, the naming will have to match.

Name the product ID as G_RemoveAds with an underscore.

Under Pricing and Availability, select Yes for Cleared for Sale. For Price Tier, I have selected Tier 1, which is $0.99USD. If you are curious about the pricing matrix, click on View Pricing Matrix.

At the bottom of the page, click on Add Language.

A pop-up window will appear. Select English as the language if not already selected. Display Name is the name of the in-app purchase that will be seen by customers.

Enter Remove Ads.

Description is the description of the in-app purchase that will be used by App Review during the review process. It is used to describe what the purchase will do.

Enter Stops displaying iAds in the game.

Then, click on Save.

For Hosting Content With Apple, select No.

There is no need to have Review Notes.

We will add a screenshot of the purchase in the game when it is done in a later chapter. As a note, without screenshots, Apple will not be able to put the game on the App Store.

Now, click on Save.

The page should load to show the purchase we just made and have the status of Waiting for screenshot. We will add a screenshot in a later chapter.

Click on Done. This should load you back to the App page. If not, click on My Apps and then select My Apps. Now, select your game.

When you are back at your game settings page, click on Game Center. The Enabled bar should already be set. If you see Disabled, click on it. The bar should turn to Enabled, and the color should turn to blue.

The next tab has two options: Single Game and Group of Games. Select Enable For Single Game.

Under Leaderboards, click on Add Leaderboard.

On the next page, under Single Leaderboard, click on Choose.

The next page will load with similar settings as the in-app purchase. For Leaderboard Reference Name, enter Distance.

For Leaderboard ID, enter G_Distance.

The Type of Score Format is Integer. This allows you to have a value that keeps track of the distance the player has moved. By whole distance, I mean a nondecimal-based value, such as 1, 2, 3, 4, and so on.

The Type of Score Submission should be set to Best Score. Leave this as it is. This way, we can save the distance with the player, save the profile locally, and only submit the score when its distance is greater than what they had done previously.

Sort Order is the order in which the leaderboards will appear. As the distance we are looking for is the highest value, change this to High to Low. This way, the player with the farthest distance will be at the top of the list.

As we have not programmed the value to calculate the distance, go ahead and leave Score Range blank. This will give us plenty of room to work with.

At the bottom of the window, click on Add Language.

Set Language to English and Name to Distance.

Score Format is a way to set a difference in the formatting of the score. For example, if our score was based on money, we would want to use a comma to separate the numbers. However, as we will use this value as a distance, we need to separate the values with a decimal point. Select Fixed Point (10.000.012,218 ).

The Score Format suffix is what will be added to the end of the score. Like before, if we were using money, we could end the formatting with "Dollars "or "Coins". As we will use this as a distance traveled, enter Yards.

Leave the Image field blank.

Then, click on Save.

The page should load back to the Add Leaderboard page with the information you have set.

Now, click on Save.

The page should load back to the Game Center page. If not, go back to My Apps, select your app and then Game Center.

For the achievements, we will set three of them. One for surviving "100 yards", one for "collecting 100 pickups", and one for "Play 10 Rounds". At the bottom of the page, click on Add Achievement.

For Reference Name of Achievement, enter 100Yards.

For ID of Achievement, enter G_100Yards.

Again, usually games would refer to these IDs with a format such as <<gamename>>.G_100Yards or literally gamename.G_100Yards, but because these names have to match the code that we are writing together and the game name is going to vary, you can use the direct achievement name: G_100Yards.

Point Value is the number of achievement points the Game Center account will be credited with when the achievement is collected. The value is completely arbitrary; you can enter anything you want. I will use 10.

Select No for Hidden. If you use Yes, the achievement won't be in the list of achievements for our game until they have earned it if the user was to look at Game Center. As I would like the players to see their achievements, they can earn before earning them; selecting No will allow them to do this.

For Achievable More Than Once, select No. This is a one time achievement.

At the bottom of the page, click on Add Language.

The Title is 100 Yards.

The Pre-earned Description tab is what will appear in Game Center if the user is to look it up. You can enter what you like to describe this achievement. I will use Survive for 100 yards.

The Earned Description tab is what will display on Game Center after the user collects the achievement. Again, this is open. I will use You survived 100 yards!.

A package of art is included with this book. In the iTunes_Connect_Achievements folder, use the image called 100Yards.png for Choose File.

The three files look similar to the following image:

Click on Save.

Back on the Add Achievement page, it should list the information for the 100 Yards achievement. Then, click on Save.

Follow the same method for the next two achievements with the following settings:

Go back to the main page for your app and scroll down to where you see Game Center. The button should be grayed out. Click on it and it should turn green.

Click on the + sign next to Leaderboards. In the window that pops up, select the single leaderboard that we set up and then click on Done.

Now, click on the + sign next to Achievements. Select all the achievements we set up and then click on Done.

At the top of the screen, there is a Save button. Click on it to save the settings.

At the top of the page, click on My Apps, and in the window that pops up, click on Agreements, Tax, and Banking.

On this page, you will have to fill out and accept the contracts for iOS Free Application, iOS Paid Applications, and iAd App Network. The process includes the personal banking information and the identity verification. When you have completed these, the game will be set up to sell and display iAds.

As Unity does not support the native functionality of iOS, we need a plugin to call the native iOS functions from Unity. For example, if we want to provide the user with the in-app purchase, we need this plugin to handle the code that takes care of this.

For our plugin to know about the specifics of our game, we must first include the Apple ID and the Bundle ID.

In Unity, click on Window at the top of the editor screen, navigate to iOS Native, and select Edit Settings.

The Inspector window should update to show iOS Native Settings.

In iTunes Connect, navigate to My Apps and click on your game. This will open the main settings page. About halfway down, you will find the text for Apple ID. This is a big integer value. Copy this and go back to Unity; you can select the text and click on Ctrl + C, or you can write it down.

In iOS Native Settings in Unity, under Apple ID, paste or enter the Apple ID from iTunes Connect:

While still in Unity, click on File in the top-left corner of the editor window. Then, navigate to Build Settings.

If your project is set to PC, Mac & Linux Standalone, click on IOS. In the bottom-left corner of the window, click on Switch Platform.

Next, in the same window, click on Player Settings. This will update the Inspector window. Under Other Settings, find the section under Identification and then the textbox labeled PlayerSettings.bundleIdentifier. In this field, enter the Bundle ID that you set up earlier. I used the reverse-domain name style, such as com.mycompanyname.appname.

If you do not remember your Bundle ID, navigate to iTunes Connect, select My Apps and then select your game. On the right-hand side of the window, click on More and then About this app. In this window, you will see the game information, including the Bundle ID of the game.

You can leave PlayerSettings.bundleVersion set to 1.0.

Apple has come a long way when it comes to making the provisions and certificates for games. This used to be a headache, but now, we can use Xcode to generate these for us.

The first step is that you will need to make a build and open it in Xcode. This can be done from your Windows or Macintosh machine, but it has to be opened on your Mac.

To create the build, open Unity and navigate to File in the top-left corner of the editor window. Then, go to Build Settings.

Make sure that the build is iOS and Development Build is checked.

As there is no reason to run this build on a device, you do not have to have a scene selected in the Scenes in build window.

Open Player Settings and make sure that PlayerSettings.bundleVersion is 1.0, and PlayerSettings.bundleIdentifier is set to the Bundle ID of your app.

Under Optimization, there are a few settings that you can keep as default so that you know what the important ones do:

When everything is set, click on Build. This will prompt you to save the build at a location on your computer. It doesn't matter where.

When the build is done, navigate to where you saved it. If you are not on a Mac, you need to copy this whole folder onto your Macintosh machine. You can do this with version control, a local network, or you can zip it up and send it to yourself and then download it on your Mac.

In order to open the project in Xcode, open the folder and double-click on the file that ends with Xcodeproj. This will open Xcode and your project.

In the General tab in Xcode, you will see the project general settings. This includes things, such as Bundle Identifier, Version, Deployment Target, and the type of devices the game will run on.

Under the Identity portion of the General settings tab, there is a drop-down menu for Team. Click on it and then select Add an account. This will open the Accounts window. In the bottom-left corner of this window, click on the small + sign and select Add Apple ID…. This will prompt you to log in with your developer credentials. Use these credentials to log in.

After logging in, you can close the Accounts window. Now, from the Team drop-down list, you should be able to change it from None to your team name, which is probably the name and e-mail you used to create your account:

To make sure the certificate went through, visit https://developer.apple.com.

At the bottom of the page, click on iOS Apps.

On the following page, if not logged in to your developer account, log in. After this, in the top-right corner, click on the link called Certificates, Identifiers & Profiles.

Under iOS Apps, click on Certificates.

When the page loads, you should have All selected in the Certificates section. On the right-hand side of your screen, you should see your name, the type of certificate, and the expiry date (1 year after the creation of it):

Through the course of this book, we will use two different types of certificates: iOS Development and iOS Distribution.

iOS Development refers to a certificate you can use during development, and iOS Distribution is the certificate that can be used when you are ready to submit your game for distribution.

The process of setting up iTunes Connect and Developer Account is important because these are the settings we will use in Unity in order to unlock achievements, leaderboards, in-app purchases, and display iAds.

If we didn't go through the process of creating an app in iTunes Connect, it would be impossible to release a game on the App Store, and if we didn't set up the Game Center features, we wouldn't be able to have achievements or leaderboards. The same is true for in-app purchases and iAds.