Crossposted on App Goodies

So you made it: after spending hours of coding, art, design and infinite bug fixing you’ve finally reached the point where you’re about to publish your first mobile game on the Google Play Store in front of millions…

Being a Google Play developer means intuitive and easy-to-learn interface, the straightforward publishing process, only a few hours (instead of weeks) of reviewing and tons of mistakes you’re likely to do!

If you haven’t worked with Google Play as a developer then you must pay attention to mistakes I did and how many troubles they have caused me.

Your KeyStore Key

While developing my first mobile game, I never realized how important key store was. I thought it was just for publishing apps on Google Play and nothing more. I didn’t consider it important at that time.

Hours later after publishing, I deleted a key store key by accident. At that time, I was working on a bug fix which I planned to release as an update as soon as it was ready for production.

Little did I know how much trouble I had…

I knew I needed a key store key to be able to compile my game so I created a new one (since the old one was lost), but never saw it’s importance in development.

Finally, I get this!

Did I need an old key store key in order to push a new update? Bollocks!

After few minutes of Googling, I realized that my old key store couldn’t be recreated or modified or recovered in any way.

In other words, I had an app which I couldn’t update or even remove from the library!

I had to create another application with the same app and publish the first one. It was an awful feeling for a person who loves the clean desk.

You will not be able to recover or recreate the exact key store. Once it’s lost – you’re done for. Do not repeat this mistake like I did!

Your can read more about the key store here.

Minimum score on Google Play

This happened when I was about to publish my second game (which was a flappy bird clone but whatever). I have implemented high score system and had the option to change the minimum score. Since I was damn good at my own game (scoring 10-20 points per game) I decided to limit score to 10 in Google Play Leaderboards interface.

Oh, what a mistake that was!
Most of my players weren’t able to score more than 2-3 points. This resulted in an empty leaderboard: my brother and me.

The sad part is that you can’t change it after the game has been published.

If you want to limit the score you want to post to a leaderboard, do that through the code. As simple as this:

if (score > 10)
{
   PostScore();
}

So then you can modify it till your heart’s content even after your game has been published.

Constantly forgetting and changing bundle identifier and/or bundle version

It wasn’t fatal to my production development, but I wasted hours because of that!

Imagine this: you just finished a new game update, your .apk file size is 80 MB. After a few minutes of compiling and dozen more of uploading it to Google Play Developer Console, you'll get an error about the wrong bundle version number.

Yikes! Now you have to go back into editor, change values and start all over again.

Conclusion

These are my personal mistakes I made while publishing for the first time on Google Play. Where did you screw up? Let me know in the comments below!

If you enjoyed this article then be sure to check out my blog for more of these!