Monday, December 22, 2014
Monday, November 24, 2014
Sky Force 2014 Reimagined for Android TV
In the coming months, we�ll be seeing more media players, like the recently released Nexus Player, and TVs from partners with Android TV built-in hit the market. While there�s plenty of information available about the technical aspects of adapting your app or game to Android TV, it�s also useful to consider design changes to optimize for the living room. That way you can provide lasting engagement for existing fans as well as new players discovering your game in this new setting. Here are three things one developer did, and how you can do them too.
Infinite Dreams is an indie studio out of Poland, co-founded by hardcore game fans Tomasz Kostrzewski and Marek Wyszy?ski. With Sky Force 2014 TV, they brought their hit arcade style game to Android TV in a particularly clever way. The mobile-based version of Sky Force 2014 reimaged the 2004 classic by introducing stunning 3D visuals, and a free-to-download business model using in-app purchasing and competitive tournaments to increase engagement. In bringing Sky Force 2014 to TV, they found ways to factor in the play style, play sessions, and real-world social context of the living room, while paying homage to the title�s classic arcade heritage. As Wyszy?ski puts it, �We decided not to take any shortcuts, we wanted to make the game feel like it was designed to be played on TV.�
Orientation
For starters, Sky Force 2014 is played vertically on a smartphone or tablet, also known as portrait mode. In the game, you�re piloting a powerful fighter plane flying up the screen over a scrolling landscape, targeting waves of steampunk enemies coming down at you. You can see far enough up the screen, enabling you to plan your attacks and dodge enemies in advance.
When bringing the game to TV, the quickest approach would have been to preserve that vertical orientation of the gameplay, by pillarboxing the field of play.
With Sky Force 2014, Infinite Dreams considered their options, and decided to scale the gameplay horizontally, in landscape mode, and recompose the view and combat elements. You�re still aiming up the screen, but the world below and the enemies coming at you are filling out a much wider field of view. They also completely reworked the UI to be comfortably operated with a gamepad or simple remote. From Wyszy?ski�s point of view, �We really didn't want to just add support for remote and gamepad on top of what we had because we felt it would not work very well.� This approach gives the play experience a much more immersive field of view, putting you right there in the middle of the action. More information on designing for landscape orientation can be found here.
Multiplayer
Like all mobile game developers building for the TV, Infinite Dreams had to figure out how to adapt touch input onto a controller. Sky Force 2014 TV accepts both remote control and gamepad controller input. Both are well-tuned, and fighter handling is natural and responsive, but Infinite Dreams didn�t stop there. They took the opportunity to add cooperative multiplayer functionality to take advantage of the wider field of view from a TV. In this way, they not only scaled the visuals of the game to the living room, but also factored in that it�s a living room where people play together. Given the extended lateral patterns of advancing enemies, multiplayer strategies emerge, like �divide and conquer,� or �I got your back� for players of different skill levels. More information about adding controller support to your Android game can be found here, handling controller actions here, and mapping each player�s paired controllers here.
Business Model
Infinite Dreams is also experimenting with monetization and extending play session length. The TV version replaces several $1.99 in-app purchases and timers with a try-before-you-buy model which charges $4.99 after playing the first 2 levels for free. We�ve seen this single purchase model prove successful with other arcade action games like Mediocre�s Smash Hit for smartphones and tablets, in which the purchase unlocks checkpoint saves. We�re also seeing strong arcade action games like Vector Unit�s Beach Buggy Racing and Ubisoft�s Hungry Shark Evolution retain their existing in-app purchase models for Android TV. More information on setting up your games for these varied business models can be found here. We�ll be tracking and sharing these variations in business models on Android TV, including variations in premium, as the Android TV platform grows.
Reflecting on the work involved in making these changes, Wyszy?ski says, �From a technical point of view the process was not really so difficult � it took us about a month of work to incorporate all of the features and we are very happy with the results.� Take a moment to check out Sky Force 2014 TV on a Nexus Player and the other games in the Android TV collection on Google Play, most of which made no design changes and still play well on a TV. Consider your own starting point, take a look at the Android TV section on our developer blog, and build the version of your game that would be most satisfying to players on the couch.
Thursday, November 20, 2014
musiXmatch drives user engagement through innovation
Posted by Leticia Lago, Google Play team
musiXmatch is an app that offers Android users the unique and powerful feature FloatingLyrics. FloatingLyrics pops up a floating window showing synched lyrics as users listen to tracks on their favorite player and music services. It�s achieved through a seamless integration with intents on the platform, something that�s technically possible only on Android.
As a result musiXmatch has seen �a dramatic increase in terms of engagement�, says founder Max Ciociola, �which has been two times more active users and even two times more the average time they spend in the app.�
The ability to deliver lyrics to a range of different devices � such as Chromecast, Android TV, and Android Wear � is creating opportunities for musiXmatch. It�s helping them turn their app into a smart companion for their users and getting them closer to their goal of reaching 100 million people.
In the following video, Max and Android engineer Sebastiano Gottardo talk about the unique capabilities that Android offers to musiXmatch:
To learn about achieving great user engagement and retention and reaching more users through different form factors, be sure to check out these resources:
- Convert installs to active users � Watch this video to hear from Matteo Vallone, Partner Development Manager for Google Play, about the best practices in engaging and retaining app users using intents, identity, context, and rich notifications as well as delivering a cross-platform user experience.
- Expanding to new form factors: Tablet, Wear & TV � Watch this panel discussion with Google experts talking about cross-platform opportunities and answering developer questions.
Wednesday, November 19, 2014
Chinese Developers Can Now Offer Paid Applications to Google Play Users in More Than 130 countries
By Ellie Powers, product manager for Google Play
Google Play is the largest digital store for Android users to discover and purchase their favorite mobile app and games, and the ecosystem is continuing to grow globally. Over the past year, we�ve expanded the list of countries where app developers can sign up to be merchants on Google Play, totaling 60 countries, including Lebanon, Jordan, Oman, Pakistan, Puerto Rico, Qatar and Venezuela most recently.
As part of that continued effort, we�re excited to announce merchant support in China, enabling local developers to export and sell their apps to Google Play users in more than 130 countries. Chinese developers can now offer both free and paid applications through various monetization models, including in-app purchasing and subscriptions. For revenue generated on Google Play, developers will receive payment to their Chinese bank accounts via USD wire transfers.
If you develop Android apps in China and want to start distributing your apps to a global audience through Google Play, visit play.google.com/apps/publish and register as a developer. If you want to sell apps and in-app products, you'll need to also sign up for a Google Wallet merchant account, which is available on the �Revenue� page in the Google Play Developer Console. After you�ve uploaded your apps, you can set prices in the Developer Console and later receive reports on your revenue. You�ll receive your developer payouts via wire transfer. For more details, please visit our developer help center.
We look forward to continuing to roll out Google Play support to developers in many more countries around the world.
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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.