Updated Cross-Platform Tools in Google Play Game Services
October 7th, 2014 | Published in Google Android
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.
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