Well, it’s been almost two years (again) since I’ve posted my previous unity plugin suggestions. So, welcome to my now officially biennial post…
As before, Unity received major updates in the mean time and now sitting at v5.3. Some of the previous plugins are not needed anymore such as Unibill (now integrated to 5.3+) or NGUI as native GUI finally become something useable.
So, I’ll cut to the chase and here are my current suggestions for must have add-ons to Unity as of today.
Most Useful Unity Plugins
- DOTween Pro (Link): Just go and get this, it’s super performant and useful. Especially if you are used to working with NGUI and switched to uGUI, you’ll find it’s Animation Component (pro feature) very very very useful.
- Grids (any version depending on your needs) (Link): That one depends on your needs. But if you are planning to use any kind of Grids in your game, don’t torture yourself by coding everything and simply use Grids instead. It’ll save you lots of time.
- InControl (Link): I’ve found this one by the suggestion from Amazon. You can support all kinds of game controllers and this is also very useful for developing games for TV’s (Apple TV, Chromecast, etc.)
- Marvelous Techniques (Link): That one contains bunch of shaders along with some sample scenes. If you’re after a special kind of look for your game, that’ll be a gem.
- CloudOnce (Link): One simple API to deal with iOS Game Center, Google Play Game Services & Amazon GameCircle. That was one the most time consuming parts of my work till that one came along. It also support Cloud saving for all 3 platforms, so do I need to say more?
And the rest
Those are still in my list, but I’ve already mentioned them before. Check out my previous post(s) for more information.
It’s been a while since my first post on the subject. Currently, many things changed (even the design) & fixed on iTunes Connect. We still have “Availability Date” but the “Release Date” is now replaced with “Version Release”. I wanted to share how those two options working together to achieve different results.
First, let’s take a look at the options.
Availability Date
That option is still working as before. By default, it’s set to the date of your app record creation. If the current date is greater than this date, then your app will be available on the App Store considering your version is “released” and approved, standing in “Ready for Sale” state. If not, it won’t be available on the store. Btw, you may also use that option to remove the app from sale, if you ever need to do that simply change the date in sometime in future as an alternative to removing the app from regions to do that.
Version Release
This option is mostly used for app updates but currently you can also use that for the new apps. For app updates, you can have an app released & available on the store but might want to withhold the release of an update until a certain event. In that case, that’s the option you’ll want to use.
Current state based on our recent experience.
- “New Releases” list problem seems to be fixed. As long as the app is released & available, and that’s happening for the first time (for the region) your app will be featured in the new releases list of that region.
- If you have a fixed release date in the future just set the availability date to match it and make sure the app will be automatically released after review.
- If you want to release manually, just make sure the availability date is set to a date in the past and manually release the app when it’s time.
- Version release might take few hours to make it to the store while availability date works faster. So, if you want to release an app at 00:00 local time of each region, use the availability date. If you release it manually at 00:00 at some local time, it’ll will be available on the store at different times for each region after the app store process complete (which might take some time as noted above).
If you have any suggestions/corrections, please share in comments so I can update the article as needed.
Well, that might sound a little bit crazy at first but it’s completely possible. Here is how…
App Preview Videos in Photoshop
If you are fortunate enough to use a Mac on OS X you may use recently updated iMove to create your app previews. Or if you have a professional video editor lying around such as Final Cut Pro X, Adobe Premiere or After Effects you can also use those. Not all of us have those in possession but I’m sure many of us have a copy of Photoshop CS installed. And if the version of your PhotoShop is CS3+ (I’ve used CS6) you’re in luck, it has very very basic (but more than enough for app previews) video capabilities similar to AFX or Premiere.
Our Case
Initially I’ve outsourced our app previews along with our trailer. That turned out great, we had app preview videos ready in requested technical format and submitted them for review along with our game. But those caused our first metadata rejection. Problem was the content in the ending of the video, we had a death scene and even if it’s very light & cartoony they’ve rejected it. So, a fair bit of warning here to our fellow developers, make sure you do not have ANY kind of death/gore/blood in your app previews or it will be rejected. If your game is about unicorns or bunnies you might be in luck, but I’m not sure how you should handle it if your game is about killing zombies with head shots…
As the rejection come in 1am in the morning I had to act quick to save some precious time to not to miss our release date. So, instead of going back to our video guy (which means waiting for at least few days to receive updated videos) I’ve decided fix those by my self. I knew about Photoshop’s video capabilities but even if I’ve never used it before, I’ve decided to dive in.
What Apple wants
App previews have many restrictions. Besides the technical restrictions (see last chapter) Apple wants you to create simple videos that shows the gameplay. Those should not feel like ads or trailers with full of effects or extra non game art/content.
So, basically you’ll need mostly game play videos stitched together with mix or fade (to black/white/color) transitions, overlaid on a one piece music for continuity. There may be few text (not recommended as localization not possible) overlays, mandatory if you need to disclose in-app purchases if the video section of the game shown requires a purchase such as a vehicle, hero, etc.
Good news is you can do all those and even a bit more with Photoshop’s video capabilities. In my opinion using a full featured video editor for that (specially if you are thinking about investing in one) would be an overkill…
How to create videos in Photoshop
Well, I might do a full tutorial on this in the future but right now I simply have no time. But, it’s not hard! A quick google search revealed the following tutorials, I’m sure there are more and those should be enough to get you started.
Make sure you have the source content in full format (1920×1080 for iPhone(s) & 1200×900 for iPad) for the best quality. I also like to bust a myth here, you don’t have to own each device (iPhone 5/6/6+ and iPad) to capture in all required sizes. Or you don’t have to own one of those devices at all in our case, I’ve just captured them from the computer using the Screenflick while playing the game in Unity editor at 1080p.
Technical Requirements of App Previews
iTunes connect is very picky when it comes to app preview videos. You’ll need to make sure your videos are formatted exactly the the way they wanted or you won’t be able to upload them or you might experience all kinds of problems.
But I have some good news and a small gift for you!
As the Photoshop’s video exporter is based on the Adobe Media Encoder I was able to create 4 preset that exports the videos exactly as Apple wanted. Once you have your video ready in Photoshop you may simply select the required preset and you’ll have 100% compatible video ready to upload.
Download the package here:
After downloading extract the contents and you’ll see 4 files with .epr extensions. Place those in the video presets folder of Photoshop so the option would be available when exporting. In my case that location on OS X was “/Applications/Adobe Photoshop CS6/Presets/Video/Adobe Media Encoder/H264/”. You’ll see bunch of other (default) epr files there. Just add those and re-start the application.
After importing, presets section of the exporter should look like this:
On another note, as those are EPR files, you may also use them in Adobe Media Encoder, Adobe Premiere or Adobe After Effects or any other editor that uses compatible format.
For best results, you should have two different projects. First one should be using 1200×900 iPad footage and exported using iPad preset. Second one should be 1920×1080 footage and you can use that one to export all 3 iPhone resolutions.
I hope that would be useful for you, if it is make sure to share using the buttons below. If you have any questions, please leave a comment below and I’ll do my best to reply as soon as I can…
When our latest game Whip Swing received a metadata reject after waiting 10 days in queue for review, I was little worried as that rejection was a first or us. We’ve fixed the issue within an hour and re-submitted but I wasn’t sure what will be our status in the queue. After spending some time with google search I was able to find some forum discussions and mentions of the the issue but there were no definitive answer.
Since we’ve experienced this at the first hand, I wanted to share my knowledge of the issue.
When your app is metadata rejected, if you fix the meta issue without touching the binary you WILL NOT go back to beginning of the review queue. In our case our app went in to review about 20hrs later and spent around 3 hours in review to get approved this time.
But if you edit or change your binary in any way, you WILL go back to beginning of the review queue. That doesn’t matter even if there was an issue with the iTunes Connect, etc. So, make sure to not to touch your binary in situations like this…
Time flies away, it’s been almost two years since I’ve posted my unity plugin suggestions for the first time. In the mean time, Unity received major updates, with added support for the new stores/devices. And of course new plugins appeared.
When it comes to scripting & editor extensions, usually there are more than one plugin that does the same thing. Plugins I’m listing here is the ones that stand out (based on feature set, support and updates) for my projects and I’m using them.
So, here is my current suggestions for most useful add-ons for Unity.
Best Unity Plugins
- NGUI (Link): You may ask why I still prefer NGUI over the other alternatives. First of all even if it might not be the most elegant GUI solution, it gets the job done. Also, support is phenomenal. If you hit a wall and report a bug (or even a new feature request) you’ll probably get it in the next update which is usually only few days away. To me, that’s as important as the feature set. Besides, native Unity GUI is on the way and I don’t feel like investing (both time/money) into another add-on GUI.
- Unibill (Link): If you are developing for multi-platform and planning to use in-app purchases that’s the only plugin you’ll ever need. It currently supports all the major stores (Samsung support is coming soon), the feature set and the support is great and the plugin is easy to implement. It’s also one of the most expensive plugins I’ve purchased, but if you don’t need it ASAP I would suggest keeping an eye on it for any possible discount promotions.
- xArm (Link): I wish I had this two years ago, but I’m happy to have it now! That is another tool essential for multi-platform development. It’ll give your the preview of your game for all different devices & screen resolutions you’ll need. That is especially important when developing for Android…
- Build Report Tool (Link): Provides an easy to read summary of your build size (iOS, Android, etc.) so you can effectively optimise it to reduce the size. You’ll know the importance of that if/when your app goes over the cellular download limit just with few megabytes…
- Pool Manager (Link): Garbage collection is not your friend (one of the biggest problems on mobile), it’ll cause frame drops, hiccups and generally bad performance when not handled properly. This plug-in does it for you, make sure to check it out…
Wait, there is more…
I haven’t actually used those throughly (yet) but each one of them is a gem… Make sure to check them out before making any decisions…
- EasyTouch (Link)
- MasterAudio (Link)
- Sound Manager Pro (Link)
- Advanced Builder (Link)
We have started developing mobile apps using Flash. Then saw it’s shortcomings and decided to move to CoronaSDK and released our fist app with it. Currently, we’re working with Unity3D.
Each of those changes had a big impact on how we work and yet, the change was necessary. But there is one tool we are using since the day 1 and I’m sure it’ll be a major part of our workflow for a long time, it’s Texture Packer from Code’n’Web.
Andreas Löw created an exceptional tool for working with sprites and the more you use it on your workflow the more you’ll understand it’s value. First of all, as I noted above we have switched our core tools 3 times but the Texture Packer was compatible with all of them. That was a big plus for us as working with sprites, bitmaps and optimising the texture memory is the core part of mobile development no matter which SDK you are using.
Texture Packer has many time/life saving features that’ll be hard to cover in one blog post. So, today I’d like to mention one particular feature that recently saved the day for me. It’s a little tick box located in Layout section called “Reduce border artifacts”.
Let me explain the problem first. When dealing with the sprites & sprite sheets, you’ll use transparencies in almost all cases. Your alpha transparency might good look on Photoshop, but depending on the device (or your framework/SDK) hardware accelerated textures & transparencies might be handled a little bit differently.
In Photoshop, transparent or semi-transparent pixels have an undefined color and Photoshop handles them in software based on layer blending methods among other things. But with graphics hardware / OpenGL transparent pixels still have a color, even if it’s fully transparent. When the graphics card mixes a transparent pixel with the image below it, color value of the transparent pixel also gets mixed in. This colour is black and as a result “ghost” outlines, a thin grey border might appear around your sprites.
Unity uses straight alpha blending, and alpha textures needs a special treatment to prevent that problem as explained here. The trick is expanding the RGB section of the image (not alpha) so transparent pixels would have proper color. They have even provided a AlphaUtility (actions for Photoshop) to help you with that problem.
But if you are working with Texture Packer, fix is one click away. Simply enable “Reduce Border Artifacts” checkbox and Texture Packer will handle that for you when exporting the sprite sheet!
Here is a simulated sample image, take a look at the three light green dots on the top left. Image on the left shows expected/fixed result while image on the right shows the alpha problem.
Texture Packer is simply the best sprite sheet generation tool you can get your hands on and it will save you many precious hours. Andreas just released v3.0.0 and I must say it’s now better than ever…
iOS 6 is out, with major changes to App Store on devices. Most of which gave a big concerns to indie developers. But there is one new feature that you should utilise for a bit more exposure, Smart App Banners.
That is basically a meta tag added to your web pages. When that page visited by an iOS 6 device it’ll show up a banner of your app with a direct link to the it’s App Store page.
If you add a small piece of code you may also use it to launch your app (if installed) with a specific page or content…
If you are visiting us on a iOS6 mobile device just go to one of our game pages to see it in action. Such as, http://www.pixelenvision.com/animal-puzzle-for-toddlers/
I would write a full tutorial but there are plenty of resources about that and there is no need to re-invent the wheel. So, I’ve decided to post some links for you…
Wordpress Plugin
More Information
WARNING!
This article is now outdated. Please see
this post for most up-to-date information regarding the subject.
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When we submit our first app to the iTunes Connect, one of the most confusing things was understanding the difference between Availability Date and Release Date. There are many discussions about that topic and some of them thinks that as a “BUG” but in reality there is no bug, that’s just how it works. To get listed on top of the “New Releases” there is no need to set Availability Date in the future and change it back to same as the Release Date once it’s released. Once you understand the connection between two, all should be clear.
Availability Date
You may initially set that date while creating your app record in iTunes Connect for the first time, it’s also editable after that even if your app is live… By default, it’s set to the date of your app record creation. Or you may set it to a different date in future.
Release Date
Simply, you have no control over this. When your app passes the review and it’s status becomes “Ready for Sale” your app is “released” by Apple at that date.
So, how those really works?
First rule is, only when the current date (today) is greater than the both, your app becomes visible on the AppStore. in other words, your app must be both “released” by Apple and “made available” by you. Otherwise, it won’t be listed anywhere.
You can use Availability Date to make your app appear on the store on a specific date. For example, if you are planning a marketing campaign and want your app to be available on a specific date but not before that, you can use that to make that happen. Only if your app is released by Apple prior to that date of course…
But there is one downside of doing that, you’ll miss the opportunity to getting listed on top of the “New Releases” section of your app categories.
If you want to be listed on top of the “New Releases’ simply do not change the Availability Date when setting up your app.
Some Examples
Let’s say the App is created on January 1st, you didn’t change the Availability Date so it is also January 1st. And let’s suppose your app waited a week for the review and released by apple at January 8th, which is also the Release Date. Outcome: Your app will be available on the App Store at January 8th and will be listed on top of the New Releases list…
Let’s say the App is created on January 1st, but you DID change the Availability Date to match your marketing release, so let’s say it is January 15th. And let’s suppose your app waited a week for the review and released by apple at January 8th, which is also the Release Date. Outcome: Your app will be available on the App Store at January 15th but it won’t be listed on top of the “New Releases”. It will be still listed, but among the apps released about a week ago, few pages back…
So there is no “BUG”, no need for hacks or fixes…
In Short
If you do not need a synchronised release with your marketing, do not change the “Availability Date” or if you do, make sure to set it to a date before Apple’s “Release Date”. You’ll get full possible exposure on “New Releases” list of your app categories.
I’ve originally made this post to PWA forum but as it might also help to developers who’s not a member, I’ve decided to post it here on our blog too… While working on our first kids app, I’ve made some research and gathered some information on that subject. So, here it is…
- Have a Privacy Policy – in the app description and/or a link on website
- Do not use analytics or data collection tools, if you do make sure to follow COPPA guidelines
- Make sure app handles multi-touch well as kids tend to touch unused parts of the screen while holding it
- For toddler apps, lock menu access to parents (using press & hold buttons, etc.)
- For toddler apps, do not place settings, info, go back, etc. buttons to the bottom of the screen
- Do not use tilt & shake controls
- Do not use swipe controls, prefer arrow navigations placed on top of the screen
- Do not use pop-up rating dialogs & such
- Do not use social network or web links, unless it’s in parents only area
- For Android app permissions, the less the better. Or do not ask for any permissions at all (if your app is suitable)
- If your app is suitable, add settings that let adults choose the concepts or levels their child can access
- Use good music AND a mute button (or an in-app volume control)
- Try to use high quality graphics made by an artist!
- For toddler apps: make sure your splash screen has one big button that kids can find and then start the game/book without further selections
- Remember that not all children /parents understand English
Some web resources on that subject
Videos
Well, that’s all I have for now. If you have something to add or objecting to something, please let us know so we can improve that list for the benefit of all…
Thx to Carolina, Kristin, Scott and all the others who contributed to the original post on PWA forums…
Dear readers, followers, friends and everyone else. I’ve recently(!) started using Dropbox but slowly running out of quota. If you do not use Dropbox yet and want to get 500MB free space on top of their default 2GB please use the following link to sign up.
By registering thru that link we both will receive 500MB extra space for nothing! If you’ve found at least one my posts or code snippets useful, please click on this link.
Dropbox free 500MB bonus
This is just landed to my inbox and I had to share it! Guys at the Code’n’Web have made a very informative (and hilarious) video about spite sheets. This is part one, take a look at their web page for more.
I’m using Texture Packer for my projects and it’s one of our indispensable tools. I’ll post a review/tutorial as soon as I have some free time…
http://www.codeandweb.com/what-is-a-sprite-sheet
This is the product image of Kindle Fire that can be used to promote your app in accordance with the Amazon Appstore for Android Trademark Usage, Brand and Marketing Guidelines.
As you might know, Amazon provides badges & icons but an official product image is not available at the time of this writing. So, we have decided to make one for our own use and also to share it.
Attached image is a very high resolution (3025 x 4200) PSD image of the Kindle Fire shell on a transparent background. Status bar is also provided on a separate layer.
Update
If you are looking for a Kindle Fire GUI elements, also take a look at this PSD resource from
Awesome Giant.
