Unfortunately, all guides found on the internet, on how to set up your project in the latter services, are outdated. I have also asked developers from Gamehouse, if they have gone through the process, but Text Express was going to be the first game with Google Play services, therefore no one has done this setup before:
One of the few people asked, if they have gone through the process of setting up their game in Google
Because of the outdated guides and no outside help, the setup of Text Express, was very slow and mostly achieved by trial and error.
As the process was very cumbersome and irritating I've shared some of the knowledge gathered in several unity forums(1, 2) and as well created my own solution post.
333 people following my post, hopefully helped all of them, with the solution I provided
SDK Initialization
While following the best practices guide for initializing the Google Play SDK, it was found out that it will interfere the start-up of the game by slowing it down by 0.5 - 2 seconds. This start-up delay comes from waiting for Google to connect to the internet and check if that player has previously authenticated the game or not. If yes, then the game automatically signs him up in their account and they continue their game progress on their new device without doing anything manually. However, this delay could be avoided and abandoning this automatic login feature and force every user to manually authenticate with google.
Deciding that the automatic login should be kept
After discussing with my technical mentor- Roel it was decided that it is better to increase the loading time, but have this automatic login for old players on new devices.
