How to optimize Unity 3D build size

unity 3d build report with size numbers

At some point in your Unity 3D development cycle, you may find yourself in a situation where your build size feels much bigger than you would expect.

In this post we are taking a look at Unity 3D tools we can use to get some insights into what’s consuming your precious build bytes.

A smaller size of a game or application is probably one of the most important non-functional requirements since it will make the app download (the first user experience) faster and more pleasant, thus improving the store conversion and saving users drive space.


>>> Continue reading <<<

Piano 3D low conversion in Microsoft Store

a aquisition funnel graph of Piano 3D app on Windows

For some reason, my app, Piano 3D, is not downloaded much even though there are a lot of people visiting the Store Page. It’s a bit disappointing, as is the fact that the app gets 23rd place for “piano” search term in the Windows Store. Probably this is related to low conversion too.

So the question is, of course, how to improve the conversion. I’m not an expert, but I’ll try the following:

  • new look and feel achieved by implementing HDRP rendering pipeline in Unity 3D
  • decreasing the app size (currently ~123MB)
  • new logo

This post will be the baseline for future updates, so just want to track conversion change. If you have any advice on what may be wrong, the comments are opened and you are more than welcome.

I’ll attach more statistics just for historical reasons.


>>> Continue reading <<<

The Microsoft Store is experiencing network issues

A Visual Studio 2022 modal window saying the microsoft store is experiencing network issues while trying to associate an app with microsoft store app

There is a problem with publishing apps to Microsoft Store which basically blocks any new submissions at this point. If you try to “Associate the app with the Store…” in your Visual Studio you will get an error saying The Microsoft Store is experiencing network issues.

Even though I’ve tried all workarounds I can think of (Upgrading VS to the latest 17.9.1 version, clearing all kinds of caching, windows credentials, signing out from VS etc), nothing seems to help. If you are experiencing the same - go to this issue on the Microsoft Developer Community portal, vote for it and leave a comment.

So far no workarounds have been provided by Microsoft and it really seems like the problem is on their side.

I’ll update the post once we have a solution.

UPDATE: the workaround for now is to use a US VPN. Although we are still waiting for MS fix for non-VPN access.

UPDATE2: the issue seem to be fixed, no workarounds required.


>>> Continue reading <<<

This blog in 2023

A graph showing unieque visitors and views for this blog in 2023

2023 is over, so it’s time to review this blog’s numbers!

The second half of 2023 was the period when I published a lot of useful articles which resulted in some traffic increase from Google and other search engines.

For the previous few months, the blog has been getting 40 unique visitors a day (1.2k a month). Let’s see who those people are and what they are looking for.


>>> Continue reading <<<

How many ECRs do you need?

An AWS diagram showing an ECR service in a separate account, consumed by other accounts.

Depending on the size and complexity of your application you may use different strategies for grouping and securing your resources and environments.

Using multiple AWS accounts is a best practice for organizing your environments and defining clear security and billing boundaries.

Each environment requires ECR access for deployments, so the question is: do we create an ECR for each account or do we use one centralized ECR for all environments?


>>> Continue reading <<<