2018 has been a big year for Visual Studio App Center, with all the updates and releases. It has been especially exciting to work with the game developer community to provide better-tailored services for your needs. Here are some of the highlights from 2018, mainly for Unity developers, as well as a glimpse into what we have in store going into the next year, for game developers in App Center.

Beginning the Journey at GDC 2018

App Center’s gaming journey began at the Microsoft booth at the annual Game Developers Conference in San Francisco in March of 2018. We knew developers had found success using HockeyApp, and App Center, to publish their games to QA teams, testers, and insiders as well as monitor crashes to create better player experiences, but we wanted to know how to make things better. We shared our vision of testing, shipping and monitoring with you and asked what you would like to see next. Your feedback helped us to first, understand that you found value in what App Center could offer and gave us an understanding on the things to work on next.

Unity Support Shipped

This last quarter has been a whirlwind for our team. In October we shipped our Unity SDK, supporting distribution, analytics, and diagnostics in App Center, and November the Unity extension editor was added. Unity developers can now get started with App Center all from within the Unity IDE. We hope to add additional capabilities to the extension editor in the future to make it even easier to use more of App Center’s offerings in your development.        

Looking Ahead to 2019 and Beyond

Releasing Unity support was a cornerstone to our plans for App Center in gaming – a building block we’ll add to in the coming months, including support for Push Notifications in Unity apps, making testing easier with games and more. Finally, I want to thank you for your passion and feedback. It has been a pleasure to hear and learn about your projects, and how App Center is helping you to create great experiences for your players. If you have not already done so, sign-up for free today, check out what we have to offer, and let us know what you need going forward. Just reach out via the chat icon in the App Center Portal or message @VSAppCenter and let us work together to make even better games in 2019.