How to Publish a Game on Sidequest

/ Oculus, Tutorial, Unity, VR / By

It’s time we publish on Sidequest.

 

If you don’t know what Sidequest is, think of it like Itch.io, but specifically for VR. Developers can use this platform to test out their prototypes and build communities around their early access games. Sidequest even acts as a discovery platform for Applab, which is Oculus’s platform for early discovery games. The more platforms our games are on, the better odds they’ll get discovered, so lets hop into how to publish for Sidequest.

You can find a link to their website here.

Installing the Right Modules

Let’s make sure we have the right modules installed for the Meta Quest 2.

Select Installs

  • Find the version of Unity that your game uses
    • Click the Cog in the Top Right and Select Add Modules
    •  Install the following
      • Android Build Support
      • OpenJDK
      • Android SDK & NDK Tools

DOUBLE CHECKING CONTROLLER SETUP

Before we start pumping out builds, I want to make sure That we’ve added the interaction profiles that we wish to publish for with our controllers. Skipping this step might leave some users disappointed when their Vive controllers aren’t working.

  • Go to Edit -> Project Settings -> XR Plug-in Management
    • Select the PC tab and make sure OpenXR = true
    • Select the Android tab and make sure Oculus = true (You can also use OpenXR here as well)
    • Expand XR Plug-in Management and select OpenXR
      • Select the Android tab
        • Under Interaction Profile
          • Select the plus sign in the bottom right and add all the controller types you wish to target (Quest for this tutorial)
 

CUSTOMIZING PLAYER SETTINGS

It’s always a good idea to make sure that our game can be identified by icons, product name, company and version. We can do all this in the Player settings.

  • Go to Edit-> Project Settings -> Player
    • Company Name = Your company or your name
    • Product Name = Name of your game
    • Version = What current version of the game you’re releasing with this build
    • Default Icon = This is the Icon that will display for your game
      • We can further customize different resolutions if we expand out the Icon tab below
    •  Under Splash Image
      • This is where the “Made With Unity” screen is setup if you’re using the free version. You can also put your company logo here using the Virtual Reality Splash Image
    •  Under the Android tab
      • Make sure Minimum API Level = Android 10.0
      • Target API Level = Automatic
      • Scripting Backend = IL2CPP
That’s it for our custom settings. Feel free to express yourself and your branding here! It’s your game, so let others know you made it!

Using A Keystore

For an extra layer of security, we’re going to add a keystore to our .apk builds.

  • Expand out Publishing Settings
    • Custom Keystore = True
    • Select Keystore Manager
      •  Select Keystore dropdown -> Create New -> Dedicated Location

Make sure to save this to a location where you won’t lose the keystore. Once saved, make sure to fill out the information. Again, use a password that you will not forget.

If you lose your keystore or password, you will not be able to update your game in the future!

BUILDING OUR ANDROID/QUEST VERSION

To build for Android/Quest, we need to head back into Unity and it’s Build Settings.
  • Go to File -> Build Settings
    • Select Android
      • Select Switch Platform
      • Set Texture Compression to ASTC
      • Select Build
        • Open your “Builds” folder
        • Create a new folder called “Android Builds”
        • Select the new folder and build your Android version!

When you’re done, you’ll be left with an APK file in your “Android Builds” folder. That’s it! Nothing left to do, but deploy to Itch!

DEPLOYING OUR BUILDS TO Sidequest

Start by going to the Sidequest website found here, and make an account.

Click on the top right, expand out “Things I Created”, and select “Create an App’.

We’ll be greeted with a page that looks like this!

 

Here we’ll need to put in a few things. The easy ones are the App Title and the Summary, but where do we find the package name?

Luckily, it’s located somewhere we’ve been before. 

  •  In the Unity Editor
    •  Edit -> Project Settings -> Player
      • Select the Android tab
        • Expand “Other Settings”
          • Scroll to Identification/ Package  Name

This is it!

Type that in and we’ll be ready to hit Save App!

Wrapping Up and Sending FOr Approval

Next we’ll be greeted with a page that looks like this.

Let’s run through this page.

  • Description – We now have a extended description page that we can use sow our players can know more about our game.
  • Search Tag – We can add different tags that players might be looking for like RPG or Shooter
  • Devices – Choose which devices our games can target
  • Comfort Level – For this, you may want to consider how likely your game is to produce VR sickness in users.
  • License – We can choose if we want to charge or not
We also need to add a download link to submit our game.
  • Click the Add button for Download Urls
    • Add the .apk file associated with your game.

Before we submit, we still need one last thing, which is marketing. Without it, we won’t be able to submit our game to be evaluated.

Clicking the Artwork & Media tab, we need to select the Listing Guide. This will show us what dimensions we’ll need for our page.

What we need to do is download the Banner image. 

This will give us the dimensions we need for different banner sizes. Opening this up in photoshop or gimp, we can then customize and make our own banner/title for our game page. I’m not going to go over how to do all that here, but this banner image should give us a good starting off point.

Once we’ve made our banner, we just need to add it to our Sidequest Artwork & Media page and we’ll be ready to submit!

Submiting and Waiting

Once we’ve added all the necessary components, we’ll be able to submit our game on the Listing Info page.

After that, it becomes a waiting game. It can take up to a week to pass the review process, but then it’ll be ready for publication. Just remember that after it’s approved, it does not mean that it’s published yet. You’ll still need to go in and publish the game.