Building and installing a Ready game on iOS

Photo by Hello I'm Nik on Unsplash (Cropped)

I’ve been playing around with Ready which is a lovely and easy to use tool that allows you to create video games. Ready is aimed at the class room to teach kids about the basics of programming in a fun way, if you’ve seen Scratch, you’ll know what I’m talking about.

Ready is made using Unity and also has the ability to export your creations and build them on Unity. Naturally once you can build them in Unity, why not go all the way and deploy them to an iOS device?

I should point out that you can play your own creation on an iOS device if you have the Ready app installed. So this is only if you’re interested in customising the behaviour of your Ready game, or perhaps you’ve wanted to know how to build your Unity game for iOS.

This blog post assumes you have Ready, Unity and Xcode installed on the same computer.

I’ll be using the personal/private use iPhone developer license (free), but the instructions are the same if you’ve got a paid iPhone developer license. I’ve used Xcode 9.4.1 (9F2000)

Unity has a free tier, so long as your new game doesn’t exceed 10,000 US dollars in profit you won’t need to buy a license 😉! I’ve used Unity 2018.1.0f2. I’ve also installed ‎Unity Remote 5 on m iOS device to allow for testing before we export the game to Xcode.

Make a game in Ready and export it

As you can see I’ve gone for a really basic animated Sprite with drag behaviour. The game was created for landscape mode. This will be important to know later on.

In Ready, click the Gear icon (game settings), then click the Export to Unity3D button.

• Create a new folder and select it as export target.

Playable in Unity

1. Open Unity > click on Open button (next to My Account link) and click into your newly exported Ready game folder, then click Open button. You want to open the project where you can see Assets and ProjectSettings folders.
2. In the Project window.
   1. Select the Assets folder.
   2. Double click on ReadyPackage asset to decompress the data.
3. In the Import Unity Package dialogue, click the Import button. This may take a while.
4. Back in the Project window.
   1. Select the Scenes folder.
   2. Double click on the PlayerScene asset to load it.
5. In the Unity menu bar, click on Ready > Recreate Project.
6. Click the Play icon to test the build.
7. Click the Play icon to stop playing.

Playable in Unity Remote

1. In the Unity menu bar click on File > Build Settings….
2. Click on the Add Open Scenes buttons.
3. Select iOS as your platform.
4. Click Switch Platform. This may take a while.
5. Close pop up window
6. Connect your iOS device to your Mac.
7. In the Unity menu bar click on Edit > Project Settings > Editor
8. In the Unity Remote section, select your connected Device from the drop down list
9. Start up the Unity Remote 5 on your iOS device
10. Click the Play icon to test the build on your iOS device.
11. Click the Play icon to stop playing.

You will notice that the game looks skewed in portrait mode, if you tilt your iOS device into landscape mode you’ll see the game correct it’s scaling.

Playable on iOS

1. In the Unity menubar click File > Build Settings….
2. Select the iOS platform.
3. Click the Player Settings button.
   1. Set your Company name.
   2. Set your icon (pick from assets).
   3. Set Default Orientation to either Landscape Right or Landscape Left.
4. Click the Build button.
5. Pick target folder and click Save. This will take a while
6. In Finder go to the target folder and open Unity-iPhone.xcodeproj, this will launch Xcode.
7. In Project navigator (left most icon [folder]) in picker, select Unity-iPhone

1. In the Identity section, update the Bundle Identifier field. Important: this must be a unique.
2. In the Signing section
   1. check Automatically manage signing
   2. Select your Team from drop down list
3. Click on this icon to fix any warnings

1. Make sure your device is connect and has been selected from the drop down list

1. Unlock your iOS device and click Play icon. This will take a while, you may also see warnings during compilation.

Marvel at your new iOS game!

You may need to trust your personal certificate (they’re renewed every six days) if you see this pop up window whilst deploying the app to your iOS device.

In iOS 11 this setting can be found in Settings > General > Profile & Device Management . Select the DEVELOPER APP profile and trust the certificate.

References

• Space Chicken - Extra Credit: Exporting the Game to Desktop
• Unity - Building your Unity game to an iOS device for testing