Google Play Developer Console

There were some things regarding how exactly the Developer Console submitting process that confused me. I'll try to describe my experiences here. Hopefully people can see this and not have to wonder what some stuff does, or how to do some things, like I did.

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- Google Play Game Services -
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GPGS is treated like an actual game. They really call it a game which I find confusing because to me it's, well, a service. So when they ask stuff like "Publish the Game?" when I save some stuff in GPGS, I get nervous that I'm publishing the same game twice or something.

Once you create your GPGS "game" you have to link it up to one or more actual games that you've made, including cross-platform which is pretty cool.

One of the slightly annoying things about making a GPGS for your game is that you need to create 5 achievements and a leaderboard, or else you can't publish it. Even if you aren't going to use those two, you still need them. Fine, whatever bro.

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- Alpha Testing -
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You upload your APK to either Alpha, Beta, or Production. If you upload to Alpha, you still have to publish a store listing, but it's not publicly viewable. You can't even search for it. Only people in your alpha testers group who have opted in for testing can visit the store listing and download the game.

Another thing I've never found out is when I'm uploading to Alpha, I have to keep incrementing the version number. What if I uploaded an APK to Production with the same version number as the Alpha APK? (This is automatic if you move your Alpha APK to Production) What if I uploaded an APK to Production with version 1 even though the Alpha APK is like version 100?

EDIT:
When you move an Alpha APK to Production, the store listing becomes public immediately, even though the Production APK isn't ready. Just watch out. For the first few hours, clicking on the install button will cause a "can't find item" error.
I have no idea what's the problem.

EDIT2:
I just uploaded a new APK straight to Production and it worked. If you know what's good for you, never move Alpha APKs to Production. Just upload a fresh copy to Production.

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- GPGS Development -
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You're going to need to download the GPGS libraries in the Android SDK Manager. Then you have to go to the Google sample apps and grab BaseGameUtils. Link up both of those to your Android project and you're set.

If you're getting tons of errors, in BaseGameUtils, it's probably outdated. I had a whole issue with this where I had the latest GPGS but the BaseGameUtils samples weren't updated yet, and I'd get hundreds of errors everywhere.

As for using the GPGS API in LibGDX, the most common method seems to be to have your LibGDX game in your core project communicate with the Android launcher in the Android project via some interface. Very awesome tutorial on how to do that here. Warning though, it's a little bit outdated. GPGS has changed their API quite a bit, but it shouldn't be too hard to figure out.

When in doubt, press Ctrl + Space. Yeah that just brings up the little Eclipse helper box thingy.

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Anyway, those were just some of the few things I was unsure about. Hopefully other Android developers using the Google Play Store find this helpful.