Lily's Day/Night Off Are Back On Google Play
August 23, 2024 at 3:23 PM
First off, the good news: Lily's Day/Night Off are finally back on Google Play!
(Links at the bottom of this post)
But holy heck, mobile app stores are annoying to deal with. Constantly changing API's, Libraries, and Policies that must be updated, agreed to, complied with. It never ends!
About a year or two ago, I got a notification that my apps were being removed from Google Play for various reasons. I did try to remedy the situation, but it was going to require way more time than I wanted to invest. So I left it as is, with plans to get to it someday.
Fast forward to a month or two ago, Google tells me that if I don't update my apps by August 31st, 2024 then I will be locked out of ever updating them again. I didn't want to lose all that history of the two games I am most proud of. So, I took some time this week, since I have time off from my job for my birthday and to work on Three Wishes. Let's just say I haven't gotten to Three Wishes yet.
I'm not the most tech savvy person when it comes down to the nitty gritty of development. I like to stay top level and make use of automation by Unity and Google to publish my stuff. So my general style of trying to fix these broken apps was basically: make new build, something is broken, fix that, and repeat until I get a build. Then upload that to Google and see what I did wrong.
It's very time consuming. Lily's Night Off is a much more recent game, and after updating the billing libraries and android APIs, it wasn't too painful to publish the new app. It was just very tedious building, getting an error, researching that error, just to get a new error in the next build. It took 2 days!
For Lily's Day Off, I needed to update the Unity version to something more recent so I could build with newer android APIs. The problem is LDO was made using unityscript, which isn't supported in newer Unity versions. I ended up finding a tool that auto-converts unityscript files to C#, but I had to do it in an empty project, and then replace every single unityscript broken reference in the new Unity version with the new C# versions of the scripts.
It took me a good 6 hours or so, which really wasn't that bad. I will attribute the time saving on LDO to all of the suffering I went through with LNO.
I'm not even gonna attempt iOS.
So yeah, my point is, it's so easy to publish to Windows. A windows build will last 30 years or more, I'll never have to think about it again. The Lily games on Steam are doing just fine! But I'm sure within a year Google will be yelling at me to update these two games again.
Anyways, for preservation's sake, I'm going to be archiving any builds I have of older games that are gonna be perma-locked out on Google Play. Diggy Dig, Don't Touch The Blocks, Kitty Can Fly, and any others I can, I'll find/make PC versions and any APKs and upload them to here so they can still be played.
Download Lily's Day Off from Google Play here!
Download Lily's Night Off from Google Play here!
(Links at the bottom of this post)
But holy heck, mobile app stores are annoying to deal with. Constantly changing API's, Libraries, and Policies that must be updated, agreed to, complied with. It never ends!
About a year or two ago, I got a notification that my apps were being removed from Google Play for various reasons. I did try to remedy the situation, but it was going to require way more time than I wanted to invest. So I left it as is, with plans to get to it someday.
Fast forward to a month or two ago, Google tells me that if I don't update my apps by August 31st, 2024 then I will be locked out of ever updating them again. I didn't want to lose all that history of the two games I am most proud of. So, I took some time this week, since I have time off from my job for my birthday and to work on Three Wishes. Let's just say I haven't gotten to Three Wishes yet.
I'm not the most tech savvy person when it comes down to the nitty gritty of development. I like to stay top level and make use of automation by Unity and Google to publish my stuff. So my general style of trying to fix these broken apps was basically: make new build, something is broken, fix that, and repeat until I get a build. Then upload that to Google and see what I did wrong.
It's very time consuming. Lily's Night Off is a much more recent game, and after updating the billing libraries and android APIs, it wasn't too painful to publish the new app. It was just very tedious building, getting an error, researching that error, just to get a new error in the next build. It took 2 days!
For Lily's Day Off, I needed to update the Unity version to something more recent so I could build with newer android APIs. The problem is LDO was made using unityscript, which isn't supported in newer Unity versions. I ended up finding a tool that auto-converts unityscript files to C#, but I had to do it in an empty project, and then replace every single unityscript broken reference in the new Unity version with the new C# versions of the scripts.
It took me a good 6 hours or so, which really wasn't that bad. I will attribute the time saving on LDO to all of the suffering I went through with LNO.
I'm not even gonna attempt iOS.
So yeah, my point is, it's so easy to publish to Windows. A windows build will last 30 years or more, I'll never have to think about it again. The Lily games on Steam are doing just fine! But I'm sure within a year Google will be yelling at me to update these two games again.
Anyways, for preservation's sake, I'm going to be archiving any builds I have of older games that are gonna be perma-locked out on Google Play. Diggy Dig, Don't Touch The Blocks, Kitty Can Fly, and any others I can, I'll find/make PC versions and any APKs and upload them to here so they can still be played.
Download Lily's Day Off from Google Play here!
Download Lily's Night Off from Google Play here!