How do you export games to Android?

Getting Started
1

We will be having a play with Unity at my Digital Arts course next week, I have loads of cool ideas for stuff, but to keep things simple, I’d like to see if we can make a game on Android.

How simple is it to make a simple kind of game and export it to the Android OS? My personal preference would be Xbox games but apparently they’re hard to do.

So can anyone help

I got the book Sams Teach Yourself Unity in 24 hours second edition from eBay in the post yesterday, there’s a section on mobile development in it, I’ll have a read.

2

Basically, just download the Android SDK and then go to Unity’s preferences to set the location of the sdk.

(btw I would’ve recommended my book :p)

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3

They have your book on Amazon for about £15 second hand, I might get it when I’ve read my current book.

4

Unity has this step-by-step tutorial in their documentation (it’s somewhat buried :P).

http://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/android-sdksetup.html

You basically need a license from Microsoft. It’s a bit involved to acquire though.

http://www.xbox.com/en-us/Developers/id

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5

Setting up the ask for the first time is a bit of a pain. Follow the links above.

But once the ask is set up, exporting to android is a one click process.

6

What kind of game would work best for a first Android project? I’m thinking of doing a Lemmings clone, bit complicated?

7

Is this your first game or first Android project? Because it’s a bit complicated for your first game.

8

First both.

What kind of game would you suggest for a first project for a complete novice?

9

For a first game I would suggest deploying to PC only. That way you can seperate out the platform quirks of android.

10

For a first game I would suggest Breakout, but other common starting places are Space Invaders or Tetris.

Or you could start with a simplistic FPS (think indoors with one gun); while that’s really inadvisable when starting from scratch, Unity handles a lot of it for you.

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11

I love recommending Pong followed by Breakout followed by Arkanoid since all three have common aspects to them so you’re not simply throwing away your previous project but are learning to build on top of existing functionality.

12

Arkanoid was a Breakout clone as I recall, I used to play it on the Spectrum, and Pong was crap, even by the very basic standard of the late 70s.

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Yeah Arkanoid is basically Breakout with power-ups, Breakout was basically Pong with an objective. Building Pong is mostly about building the paddles and the ball objects you need for the later games without being overwhelmed by the other parts you need to build.

14

Shouldn’t take any time at all to make and deploy then.

15

It’s the same scenario though as that guy who made Flappy Bird right? If I made a game similar to Pong and released it into the public domain, wouldn’t Atari sue the pants off me as they own the original copyright? Like Nintendo sued him for copying the pipes from the Super Mario games?