Maps SDK for Unity Overview

The Maps SDK for Unity is a set of development tools, services, and ready-made assets, that extend the Unity game development environment with features that allow you to create real-world mobile games—easily!

The Statue of Liberty GameObject

The SDK provides access to high quality geo data from the Google Maps database. The client library retrieves geo data at runtime, and generates the game world based on the player’s physical location. The SDK provides basemaps of the highest quality available, and upon them, renders geographic features such as buildings (footprint + height), monuments, roads, and water areas—as 3D textured meshes (that is, as Unity GameObjects).

All geographic feature GameObjects have the following components: Transform, Mesh Renderer, and Mesh Filter. This gives you a sound starting point to work from, to customize geographic features with styling and effects components like Rigidbody, Collider, and Materials. And the SDK gives you access to the stages of the GameObject creation pipeline, allowing you to customize the way that geographic feature are created, and the way that they render. Geographic features also include MapFeatureMetadata, which includes a placeId, and the name of the geographic feature.

Supported platforms

Although Unity supports deploying games to over 25 platforms, the Maps SDK for Unity supports deploying to just the iOS and Android mobile platforms.