Tag Archives: Games

Coding Android TV games is easy as pie

Posted by Alex Ames, Fun Propulsion Labs at Google*

We’re pleased to announce Pie Noon, a simple game created to demonstrate multi-player support on the Nexus Player, an Android TV device. Pie Noon is an open source, cross-platform game written in C++ which supports:

  • Up to 4 players using Bluetooth controllers.
  • Touch controls.
  • Google Play Games Services sign-in and leaderboards.
  • Other Android devices (you can play on your phone or tablet in single-player mode, or against human adversaries using Bluetooth controllers).

Pie Noon serves as a demonstration of how to use the SDL library in Android games as well as Google technologies like Flatbuffers, Mathfu, fplutil, and WebP.

  • Flatbuffers provides efficient serialization of the data loaded at run time for quick loading times. (Examples: schema files and loading compiled Flatbuffers)
  • Mathfu drives the rendering code, particle effects, scene layout, and more, allowing for efficient mathematical operations optimized with SIMD. (Example: particle system)
  • fplutil streamlines the build process for Android, making iteration faster and easier. Our Android build script makes use of it to easily compile and run on on Android devices.
  • WebP compresses image assets more efficiently than jpg or png file formats, allowing for smaller APK sizes.

You can download the game in the Play Store and the latest open source release from our GitHub page. We invite you to learn from the code to see how you can implement these libraries and utilities in your own Android games. Take advantage of our discussion list if you have any questions, and don’t forget to throw a few pies while you’re at it!

* Fun Propulsion Labs is a team within Google that's dedicated to advancing gaming on Android and other platforms.

Going Global: Space Ape Games Finds Success in Japan

By Leticia Lago, Google Play team

There are many ways to find success for a game on the international stage: it’s not a simple formula, it’s a combination of things, ranging from localizing effectively to choosing the right price. London-based Space Ape Games brought together a range of resources and tactics to take Samurai Siege into Japan, growing that market to contribute up to 15% of the game’s average $55,000 daily earnings.

John Earner, Simon Hade, and Toby Moore founded Space Ape Games in 2012 with just 12 people. Their goal, to create amazing multiplayer mobile games. Samurai Siege is their first game and they found that Android players have great retention and monetize well. “Our experience has been great with Google Play. We have found that it is half of our audience and half of our business,” says John.

Check out the video below to hear more about how Space Ape expanded to Japan.


Resources to help you grow globally

You can grow your games business worldwide too, and maximize your distribution potential with Google Play. Be sure to check out these resources:

  • Reaching players in new territories panel [VIDEO] — Hear first hand experiences from game developers who have successfully taken games to international markets. Antonin Lhuillier (Gameloft), Anatoly Ropotov (Game Insight), Saad Choudri (Miniclip), Eyal Rabinovich (Playscape), and Joe Raeburn (Space Ape Games) share their tips for localization, culturalization, and more.
  • Go Global session [VIDEO] — Hyunse Chang, from the Google Play Apps and Games team in Korea, shares key insights into APAC markets and trends among successful apps and games in the region. Leverage these pro tips and best practices to expand your reach to a wider audience.
  • Localization checklist — This document identifies the essential aspects of localization, to help you get your app ready for a successful worldwide launch on Google Play.

Updated Cross-Platform Tools in Google Play Game Services

By Ben Frenkel, Google Play Games team

Game services UIs are now updated for material design, across all of the SDKs.

Game developers, we've updated some of our popular developer tools to give you a consistent set of game services across platforms, a refreshed UI based on material design, and new tools to give you better visibility into what users are doing in your games.

Let’s take a look at the new features.

Real-time Multiplayer in the Play Games cross-platform C++ SDK

To make it easier to build cross-platform games, we’ve added Real-Time Multiplayer (RTMP) to the latest Google Play Games C++ SDK. The addition of RTMP brings the C++ SDK to feature parity with the Play services SDK on Android and the Play Games iOS SDK. Learn more »

Material Design refresh across Android, cross-platform C++, and iOS SDKs

We’ve incorporated material design into the user-interface of the latest Play Games services SDKs for Android, cross-platform C++, and iOS. This gives you a bold, colorful design that’s consistent across all of your games, for all of your users. Learn more »

New quests features and completion statistics

Quests are a popular way to increase player engagement by adding fresh content without updating your game. We’ve added some new features to quests to make them easier to implement and manage.

First, we’ve simplified quests implementations by providing out-of-the-box toasts for “quest accepted” and “quest completed” events. You can invoke these toasts from your game with just a single call, on any platform. This removes the need to create your own custom toasts, though you are still free to do so.

You also have more insight into how your quests are performing through new in-line quest stats in the Developer Console. With these stats, you can better monitor how many people are completing their quests, so you can adjust the criteria to make them easier to achieve, if needed. Learn more »

Last, we’ve eliminated the 24-hour lead-time requirement for publishing and allowing repeating quests to have the same name. You now have the freedom to publish quests whenever you want with whatever name you want.

New quest stats let you see how many users are completing their quests.

Multiplayer game statistics

Now when you add multiplayer support through Google Play game services, you get multiplayer stats for free, without having to implement a custom logging solution. You can simply visit the Developer Console to see how players are using your multiplayer integration and look at trends in overall usage. The new stats are available as tabs under the Engagement section. Learn more »

Multiplayer stats let you see trends in how players are using your app's multiplayer integration.

New game services insights and alerts

We’re continuing to expand the types of alerts we offer the Developer Console to let you know about more types of issues that might be affecting your users' gameplay experiences. You’ll now get an alert when you have a broken implementation of real-time and turn-based multiplayer, and we’ll also notify you if your Achievements and Leaderboard implementations use too many duplicate images. Learn more »

Get Started

You can get started with all of these new features right away. Visit the Google Play game services developer site to download the updated SDKs. For migration details on the Game Services SDK for iOS, see the release notes. You can take a look at the new stats and alerts by visiting the Google Play Developer Console.

New Cross-Platform Tools for Game Developers

By Ben Frenkel, Google Play Games team

There was a lot of excitement at Google I/O around Google Play Games, and today we’re delighted to share that the following tools are now available:

  • Updated Play Games cross-platform C++ SDK
  • Updated Play Games SDK for iOS
  • New game services alerts in the Developer Console

Here's a quick look at the cool new stuff for developers.

Updated Play Games C++ SDK

We've updated the Google Play Games C++ SDK with more cross-platform support for the new services and experiences we announced at I/O. Learn more»

The new C++ SDK now supports all of the following:

Cocos2D-x, a popular game engine, is an early adopter of the Play Games C++ SDK and is bringing the power of Play Games to their developers. Additionally, the Cocos2D-x team created Wagon War, a prototype game showcasing the capabilities of the Cocos2D-x engine with Play Games C++ SDK integration.

Wagon War is also a powerful reference for developers — it gives you immediately usable code samples to accelerate your C++ implementations. You can browse or download the game sources on the Wagon War page on GitHub.

Updated Play Games iOS SDK

The Play Games iOS SDK is now updated with support for Quests and Saved Games, enabling iOS developers to integrate the latest services and experiences with the Objective-C based tool-chains they are already familiar with. Learn more»

The new Play Games SDK for iOS now supports all of the following:

  • Quests and Events. Learn more»
  • Saved Games. Learn more»
  • Game Profile and related Player XP APIs — the SDK now also provides the UI for Game Profile and access to Player XP data for players.

New types of games services alerts

Last, you can now see new types of games services alerts in the Developer Console to learn about issues that might be affecting your users' gameplay experiences. For example, if your app implements Game Gifts, you'll now see an alert when players are unable to send a gift; if your app implements Multiplayer, you'll now see an alert when players are unable to join a match. Learn more»

Games at Google I/O ’14: Everyone’s Playing Games

By Greg Hartrell, Product Manager, Google Play games

With Google I/O ‘14 here, we see Android and Google Play as a huge opportunity for game developers: 3 in 4 Android users are playing games, and with over one billion active Android users around the world, games are reaching and delighting almost everyone.

At Google, we see a great future where mobile and cloud services bring games to all the screens in your life and connect you with others. Today we announced a number of games related launches and upcoming technologies across Google Play Games, the Android platform and its new form factors.

Google Play Games

At last year’s Google I/O, we announced Google Play Games -- Google’s online game platform, with services and user experiences designed to bring players together and take Android and mobile games to the next level.

Google Play Games has grown at tremendous speed, activating 100 million users in the past 6 months. It’s the fastest growing mobile game network, and with such an incredible response, we announced more awesome enhancements to Google Play Games today.

Game Profile

The Play Games app now gives players a Game Profile, where they earn points and vanity titles from unlocking achievements. Players can also compare their profile with friends. Developers can benefit from this meta-game by continuing to design great achievements that reward players for exploring all the content and depth of their game.

Quests and Saved Games

Two new game services will launch with the next update for Google Play Services on Android, and through the Play Games iOS SDK:

  • Quests is a service that enables developers to create online, time-based goals in their games without having to launch an update each time. Now developers can easily run weekend or daily challenges for their player community, and reward them in unique ways.
  • Saved Games is a service that stores a player’s game progress across many screens, along with a cover image, description and total time played. Players never have to play level 1 again by having their progress stored with Google, and cover images and descriptions are used in Play Games experiences to indicate where they left off and attract them to launch their favorite game again.

We have many great partners who have started integrating Quests and Saved Games, here are just a few current or upcoming games.

More tools for game developers

Other developer tools are now available for Play Games, including:

  • Play Games Statistics — Play Games adopters get easy effort game analytics through the Google Play Developer console today, including visualization of Player & Engagement statistics. What’s new is aggregated player demographic information for signed-in users, so you can understand the distribution of your player’s ages, genders and countries.
  • Play Games C++ SDK is updated with more cross-platform support for the new services and experiences we announced. Cocos2D-x, a popular game engine, is an early adopter of the Play Games C++ SDK bringing the power of Play Games to their developers.

Game enhancements for the Android Platform

With the announcement of the developer preview of the Android L-release, there are some new platform capabilities that will make Android an even more compelling platform for game development.

  • Support for OpenGL ES 3.1 in the L Developer Preview — Introducing powerful features like compute shaders, stencil textures, and texture gather, enables more interesting physics or pixel effects on mobile devices. Additional API and shading language improvements improve usability and reduce overhead.
  • Android Extension Pack (AEP) in the L Developer Preview — a new set of extensions to OpenGL ES that bring desktop class graphics to Android. Games will be able to take advantage of tessellation and geometry shaders, and use ASTC texture compression.

    We're pleased to be working with different GPU vendors to adopt AEP including Nvidia, ARM, Qualcomm, and Imagination Technologies.

  • Google Gamepad standards — We recently published a standard for gamepad input for OEMs and partners who create and enable these awesome input devices on Android. The standard makes this input mechanism compatible across Google platforms on Android, Chrome and Chromebooks. You can learn more here: Supporting Game Controllers.

Play Games on Android TV

And Google's game network is a part of the Android TV announcement — so think of Android on a TV, with a rich interface on a large screen, and fun games in your living room! Players will be able to earn achievements, climb leaderboards and play online with friends from an Android TV. This is only available through the developer preview, so game developers seeking a hardware development kit (the ADT-1) can make a request at http://developer.android.com/tv.

Updates rolling out soon

That’s a lot of games announcements! Our Play Games changes will roll out over the next few weeks with the update of Google Play Services and the Play Games App, and Android L-release changes are part of the announced developer preview. This gets us a big step closer to a world where Android and our cloud services enable games to reach all the screens in your life and connect you with others.

Greg Hartrell is the lead product manager for Google Play Games: Google's game platform that helps developers reach and unite millions of players. Before joining Google, he was VP of Product Development at Capcom/Beeline, and prior to that, led product development for 8 years at Microsoft for Xbox Live/360 and other consumer and enterprise product lines. In his spare time, he enjoys flying birds through plumbing structures, boss battles and pulling rare objects out of mystery boxes.

Explore the conference with the Google I/O 2014 Android app:

Get it on Google Play

New Demographic Stats in Google Play Games Services

By Ben Frenkel, Google Play Games team

Hey game developers, back in March you may remember we added new game statistics in the Google Play Developer Console for those of you who had implemented Google Play Games: our cross-platform game services for Android, iOS and the web.

Starting today, we're providing more insights into how your games are being used by adding country, age, and gender dimensions to the existing set of reports available in the Developer console. You’ll see demographics integrated into Overview stats as well as the Players reports for New and Active users.

In the Overview stats you can now see highlights of activity by age group, most active countries, and gender.

With a better understanding of your users’ demographic composition, you'll be able to make more effective decisions to improve retention and monetization. Here a few ways you could imagine using these new stats:

  • You just launched your new game globally, and expected it do particularly well in Germany. Using country demographic data, you see that Germany is much less active than expected. After some digging, you realize that your tutorial was not properly translated to German. Based on this insight, you immediately roll out a fix to see if you can improve active users in Germany.

In the Players stats section the new metrics reveal trends in how your app is doing across age groups, countries, and gender.

  • After Looking at your new demographics report you realize that your game is really popular with women in their mid-20s. Your in-app purchase data corroborates this, showing that the one female hero character is the most popular purchase. Empowered by this data, you race to add female hero characters to your game.

Additionally, if you're already using Google Play game services, there's no extra integration needed! By logging in to the Google Play Developer Console you can start using demographics to better inform your decisions today.

Google Developer Day at GDC

Day 2 of Game Developers Conference 2014 is getting underway and today Google is hosting a special Developer Day at Moscone Center in San Francisco.

Join us at the sessions

Building on yesterday’s announcements for game developers, we'll be presenting a series of sessions that walk you through the new features, services, and tools, explaining how they work and what they can bring to your games.

We'll also be talking with you about how to reach and engage with hundreds of millions of users on Google Play, build Games that scale in the cloud, grow in-game advertising businesses with AdMob, track revenue with Google Analytics, as well as explore new gaming frontiers, like Glass.

If you’re at the conference, the Google Developer Day sessions are a great opportunity to meet the developer advocates, engineers, and product managers of the Google products that drive users, engagement and retention for your games. If you’re remote, we invite you to sit-in on the sessions by joining the livestream below or on Google Developers channel on YouTube.

The Developer Day sessions (and livestream) kick off at 10:00AM PDT (5:00PM UTC). A complete agenda is available on the GDC Developer Day page.



LiquidFun 1.0

Last December we announced the initial release of LiquidFun, a C++ library that adds particle physics, including realistic fluid dynamics, to the open-source Box2D.

To get Google Developer Day started, we’re releasing LiquidFun 1.0, an update that adds multiple particle systems, new particle behaviors, and other new features.

Check out the video below to see what Liquid Fun 1.0 can do, visit the LiquidFun home page, or join today's LiquidFun session at Google Developer Day to learn how LiquidFun works and how to use particle physics in your games. The session starts at 4:35PM PDT (11:35PM UTC).



Readying AdMob for the Second App Economy with New Features: Livestream from GDC Today

According to Gartner, more than 130 billion apps will be downloaded onto phones and tablets in 2014, and most of them will be free. At the same time, revenue from apps is expected to grow by over 200% in the next 4 years. That may sound contradictory, but the reason has been clear to many developers for some time: while the first app economy was predominantly focused on paying for apps up front, we’re now seeing the rise of a second app economy, the era of free apps and incremental payments.

In this second app economy, the currency of success has altered significantly, centered on three critical areas:

  • Understanding audiences: Developers should be able to segment their audiences based on in-app behavior and turn data into useful insights for better monetization.

  • Growing in-app purchase revenue: According to Gartner, soon in-app purchases will account for almost half of all app store revenues, but this model requires a sophisticated approach from app developers and the right tools haven’t been available.

  • Maximizing ad revenue: Developers shouldn’t have to worry about managing ads; ads should optimize themselves, in real time, so developers can focus on other important parts of their business.

To help every developer succeed in this new economy, the AdMob team will be at the Game Developers Conference today to share four announcements.

1. Google Analytics now directly available in AdMob.
We introduced mobile app analytics in mid 2012 and there are hundreds of thousands of app developers using it already. We've now built Google Analytics directly into AdMob so developers can understand how people are using their app, segment them based on behavior in just a few clicks, then act on those insights. For example, the Google Analytics ecommerce report shows key insights into in-app purchases: top items sold, overall revenue and average order value. Now that Google Analytics is built directly into AdMob, developers can have a holistic view on their monetization based not only on revenue from ads but also on in-app purchase performance. All these functionalities have been incorporated into the updated Home tab in AdMob, making it a one-stop shop for all your performance reports.

2. In-App Purchase Ads.
To help developers promote in-app purchases to users in a more relevant way, we're also introducing in-app purchase ads. A developer can use these ads to promote in-app items at the right time to the users who are most likely to make a purchase, while still showing AdMob ads to those who aren't. Segmentation tools enable developers to quickly find these users, and then in-app purchase ads can be used to build relevant interstitial ads to reach them. For example, a developer can discover which of their users began playing their game in the last 48 hours, and promote a ‘welcome pack’ of extra lives at a 50% discount. This creates a more customized experience for users and can help prolong engagement. A developer can also choose where to place these interstitial ads in their app, and they can appear in either portrait or landscape mode.

In-App Purchase Ad

3. Ad network optimization and Live CPM.
If a developer is using more than one ad network to monetize their apps, a mediation tool helps to manage them. However, these tools may not optimize for the highest revenue. To solve this, ad network optimization obtains the most up-to-date CPMs from ad networks in the AdMob mediation stack, and requests ads from the highest paying one.

Live CPM goes one step further to ensure developers earn the most money from their ad impressions. When a developer uses AdMob to monetize, they get real-time access to all of Google’s demand sources, including programmatic demand, via our integration with DoubleClick Ad Exchange. For each ad request, Live CPM compares the highest CPM a developer can get from Google’s demand sources, with the CPM they could get from other networks in their mediation stack. If a higher-paying ad is available from Google’s demand sources, it will serve that ad over lower-paying CPMs offered by the other networks. App developer iHandy Inc. began using Live CPM in February this year. Many apps' revenues increased at different rates, and certain apps achieved a 200% increase.

4. The App Developer Business Kit.
The App Developer Business Kit is an in-depth website designed to help app developers understand ways to build a successful business. For example, there are detailed chapters about building an app, different ways to earn money, and options for marketing your app. You can also check out the interviews with developers, read case studies and view market insights from AdMob surveys which give developers a head start into building apps for global users. For example, did you know that a third of smartphone gamers in China have spent money in apps to personalize characters?

Tune into Google’s GDC livestream today at 10AM PST. We have sessions for game developers all day, and the AdMob talk is from 12-12.30PM PST.

Posted by Jonathan Alferness, Product Management Director, Google

Google Play services 4.3

gps

A new release of Google Play services has begun rolling out worldwide and we have lined up a number of features you can use to improve your apps. Specifically, this version adds some new members to the Google Play services family: Google Analytics API, Tag Manager, and the Address API. We’ve also made some great enhancements to the existing APIs; everything to make sure you stay on top of the app game out there.

Once the rollout is complete, you'll be able to download the Google Play services SDK using the SDK Manager and get started with the new APIs. Watch for more information coming soon.

Here are the highlights of the 4.3 release.


Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager

The Analytics API and Google Tag Manager has existed for Android for some time as standalone technologies, but with this release we are incorporating them as first class citizens in Google Play services. Those of you that are used to the API will find it very similar to previous versions, and if you have not used it before we strongly encourage you to take a look at it.

Google Analytics allows you to get detailed statistics on how you app is being used by your users, for example what functionality of your app is being used the most, or which activity triggers users to convert from an advertised version of an app to paid one. Google Tag Manager lets you change characteristics of your app on-the-fly, for example colors, without having to push an update from Google Play.


Google Play Games services Update

The furious speed of innovation in Android mobile gaming has not slowed down and neither have we when it comes to packing the Google Play Game services API with features.

With this release, we are introducing game gifts, which allows players to send virtual in-game requests to anyone in their Google+ circles or through player search. Using this feature, the player can send a 'wish' request to ask another player for an in-game item or benefit, or a 'gift' request to grant an item or benefit to another player.

This is a great way for a game to be more engaging by increasing cross player collaboration and social connections. We are therefore glad to add this functionality as an inherent part of the Games API, it is an much-wanted extension to the multi-player functionality included a couple of releases ago. For more information, see: Unlocking the power of Google for your games.


Drive API

The Google Drive for Android API was just recently added as a member of the Google Play services API family. This release adds a number of important features:

  • Pinning - You can now pin files that should be kept up to date locally, ensuring that it is available when the user is offline. This is great for users that need to use your app with limited or no connectivity
  • App Folders - An app often needs to create files which are not visible to the user, for example to store temporary files in a photo editor. This can now be done using App Folders, a feature is analogous to Application Data Folders in the Google Drive API
  • Change Notifications - You can now register a callback to receive notifications when a file or folder is changed. This mean you no longer need to query Drive continuously to check if the data has changed, just put a change notification on it

In addition to the above, we've also added the ability to access a number of new metadata fields.


Address API

This release will also includes a new Address API, which allows developers to request access to addresses for example to fill out a delivery address form. The kicker is the convenience for the user; a user interface component is presented where they select the desired address, and bang, the entire form is filled out. Developers have been relying on Location data which works very well, but this API shall cater for cases where the Location data is either not accurate or the user actually wants to use a different address than their current physical location. This should sound great to anyone who has done any online shopping during the last decade or so.

That’s it for this time. Now go to work and incorporate these new features to make your apps even better!
And stay tuned for future updates.




Unlocking the Power of Google for Your Games, at GDC

By Greg Hartrell, Google Play Games team

Today, everyone is a gamer. In fact, 3 in every 4 Android users are playing games, allowing developers to reach an unprecedented audience of players in an Android ecosystem that’s activated over one billion devices. This has helped Google Play Games — Google’s cross-platform game service and SDK for Android, iOS and the web (which lets you easily integrate features like achievements, leaderboards, multiplayer and cloud save into your games) — grow at tremendous speed. The momentum continues on Google Play, where four times more money was paid out to developers in 2013 than in 2012.

With the Game Developers Conference (GDC) this week, we'll be launching a number of new features for Google Play Games and other Google products. As they launch over the coming weeks, these new services and tools will help you unlock the power of Google to take your games to the next level.

Power your game and get discovered

With game gifts, players in your games can send virtual in-game objects to anyone in their circles or through multiplayer search.

To help players get the most out of your games, Play Games will be expanding engagement and discovery options.

We'll be introducing game gifts, a new service that lets players send virtual in-game objects to anyone in their circles or through player search. The Play Games app now supports multiplayer invites directly, further helping players discover your game and keep them playing. And the Google Play Store will also feature 18 new game categories, making it easier for players to find games they'll love.

Tools to take your game to the next level

Further enhancing Google Play Game services, we're expanding multiplayer to support iOS, bringing turn-based and real-time multiplayer capabilities to both Android and iOS.

To further help with cross platform game development, we're updating our Play Games Unity Plug-in to support cross-platform multiplayer services, and introducing an early Play Games C++ SDK to support achievements and leaderboards.

In addition, we're launching enhanced Play Games statistics on the Google Play Developer Console, providing easy game analytics for Play Games adopters. Developers will gain a daily dashboard that visualizes player and engagement statistics for signed in users, including daily active users, retention analysis and achievement, and leaderboard performance.

Ad features to better optimize your business

Of course, once you build a great gaming experience, it's important to get rewarded for your work, which is why we'll also be introducing new features to the AdMob platform. We're making Google Analytics available directly in the AdMob interface, so you can gain deeper insights into how users are interacting with your app. Turning those insights into effective action is vital, so we're excited by the opportunities that in-app purchase ads will offer — enabling you to target users with specific promotions to buy items in your game. Advertising continues to be a core vehicle driving many game developers' success, so we're also bringing you new ways to optimize your ads to earn the most revenue.

Where to find us at GDC

That's just a taste of some of the things we'll be talking about this week at GDC. On Tuesday, March 18, when most of these features will become available, we'll be hosting a Developer Day to dive into these topics in more detail. We'll be talking with you about how to reach and engage with hundreds of millions of users on Google Play, build Games that scale in the cloud, grow in-game advertising businesses with AdMob, track revenue with Google Analytics, as well as explore new gaming frontiers, like Glass.

If you can't make any of the Google Developer Day sessions, don't worry; all the talks will be livestreamed on YouTube, starting at 10:00AM PDT (5:00PM UTC). You can also meet the Play, AdMob, Analytics, and Cloud teams at the Google Education Center in the Moscone Center's South Hall (booth 218) from March 19-21.