Hello, I have a question regarding publishing a game on the Windows Store platform
Does our game needs a SDK to publish on the Windows Store? And what is the best practice in order to publish on this store (is there a documentation already available)?
Regarding saving, is ok to be done with PlayerPrefs or it needs to be set up differently?
Thank you in advance!
Fabio
Yes, you must install a Windows 10 SDK in order build and run a Windows Store App (aka Universal Windows App or UWP). Note if you don’t have the proper SDK installed, your project won’t even build.
Typically Windows SDKs are installed automatically via Visual Studio, but to develop UWP apps you must also install the “Universal Windows App development” workflow from the Visual Studio Installer. See this Microsoft doc page for instructions on configuring Visual Studio for UWP development.
For basic Unity UWP apps, you only need the “base” Windows 10 SDK version (10.0.1.10240.0), however if you plan on targeting specific Windows 10 features, e.g. Windows Mixed Realty, you’ll also need to install more recent SDK releases, depending on the APIs and features you want to use.
Specific Windows 10 SDK releases can be installed by selecting the “Individual components” tab in Visual Studio Installer, and checking the boxes for specific Windows 10 SDKs. Refer to this SO post for some more details.
When building your project in Unity, by default the base SDK is selected (10240) in the UWP Build Settings dialogue box, but you can select other SDK versions from the “Target SDK Version” drop-down list, documented here. Note: this drop-down list only include sthe SDK versions you currently have installed.
Keep in mind, all this setting does is configure the Visual Studio Solution (generated by Unity) to use a specific SDK, but you can always change this directly within the Visual Studio project settings. Unity itself only uses the base Windows 10 SDK, and this setting is only relevant if you call other WinRT APIs directly from your scripts.
To publish a UWP app, refer to Microsoft documentation for instructions.
Finally, you don’t have to use PlayerPrefs for saving, and you can save your own individual data files. With UWP, the only restriction is the location to save data files; your app can only read/write files from specific folders. Use the Application.persistantDataPath API to get folder path were you app is allowed to save persistent data file (game saves, settings, etc.)