Simple PayPal Storefront is a project I’ve been working on for about 6 months that aims to seamlessly integrate Unity 3D games with PayPal services.
I first started working on this project during the 2015 winter holidays just after releasing Red Carpet Riot. The motivation for this project came from some of the extra features I wanted to implement in Red Carpet riot, such as an global leaderboard and in-game item purchases/upgrades system. To implement these features, I needed to integrate the game with an online database that’s capable of storing player scores and item inventories.
This meant that I needed to:
A) Create an online database
B) Create an online service to handle incoming and outgoing game data
C) Integrate my game with the online service, and finally
D) Figure out how to do all the above
As you can see, a seemingly simple feature such as implementing an online leaderboard system is quite in-depth in terms of actually coding an end-to-end working solution. Each of the above tasks takes considerable time to implement and that’s without even considering the integration of online purchases and transactions for in-game items yet…
The following diagram is taken from my final uni presentation for this project which illustrates the high-level business process involved for the implementation of in-game item purchases:
Given the complexity of the above model, it’s no surprise that these sorts of features (leaderboards & in-game purchases) are often implemented in games via third party solutions. Admittedly the third party approach was the first avenue I took when looking to implement these features in my own games too. However I found thatthe free plugins on the Unity 3D asset store I looked at didn’t quite offer what I wanted. Although I was able to get an idea of what was required to implement these sort of features by looking at the source code of some of these existing plugins.
This was essentially the starting point for this project. From here I began to learn the basics of PHP and MySQL as well as implementing PayPal’s APIs to facilitate transactions for in-game item purchases. There was one article in particular that really helped me get started on this project, which was Paul Firth’s article on Accepting PayPal in games.
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Approximately six months later I have developed my own Unity 3D asset: Simple Paypal Storefront which provides a complete in-game store front and purchases solution to game developers with minimal setup requirements. In the future I hope to continue developing improvements for this project such as allowing multiple item purchases per transaction and enhancing the current inventory/item-usage functionality.
Check it out 
Red Carpet Riot is a single player, action role-playing game where the player controls a rookie entertainment reporter on the red carpet at the Academy Awards.
Reptilian Entertainment 