[music playing] dan galpin: 10 thingsgame developers should know-- this isthe third time i've done this talk ingdc-- especially if they want to get featured.
Android things, so let's start with androiddesign applies to you, or at leastconsiderate it, mostly. what we mean is you don'thave to use flat sprites, but you should take a look atthe core app quality guidelines
we have ondeveloper.android.com. and especially look atthings like launcher icons, because it's the mostimportant asset for your brand. please consider not makingit a rounded rectangle. it's not requiredon our platform. also, look at navigation[? in ?] handling the back key, becauseeven if your ux looks completely custom,the back key better work in a reasonable way.
phones sometimeshave hardware keys. and notifications--the featuring team hates spammy notifications. your application should notuse more than one notification at a time as a guideline. and you should combinenotifications on jelly bean and above. two, support the newstuff and the old stuff. what do we mean by this?
in your manifest, alwayssupport the latest version you have tested against. this turns off anycompatibility hacks that might slowyour performance, and the [? featured ?]committee likes it. but of course, if you'reusing an ndk application, your app platform must be lessthan or equal to your min sdk version, because thisis a c++ abi after all, so we don't haveforward compatibility.
three, using immersive mode. one of the new featuresyou might want to use is immersive modewhen it makes sense. if you're not doingan immersive game, you probably don'tneed immersive mode. so it just makes a potentiallyconfusing navigation experience your playerswhen the nav bar disappears. but if you have someawesome real time space simulation that would benefitfrom immersive mode, go for it.
four, support cloud save. it doesn't have to beours-- any cloud save. but your users willreally appreciate it. and of course, it'snice if it's ours. you get all sortsof great features, along with play game services. and we call this savedgames, really creatively. five, respect user privacy. what we mean here isminimize permissions, ok?
so i used to talk about thetop 10 bad game permissions. there's really no bad list. but if you're usinganything like this, you probably don'thave a good reason. and if your middlewarerequires it, you probably shouldn'tbe using that middleware. finally, make sure that youunderstand when the advertising id can and must be used. remember that you really areresponsible for any middleware
your game uses. six, play by therules of google play. speaking of advertisingid, take a close look at your developer distributionagreement and your program policies. read these policies. remember that ourenforcement team deals with thousandsof infractions daily and has little patiencewith the bad guys.
so if you think whatyou're doing is even violating the spirit ofthese policies, think again. all right. seven, controls. be flexible with your controls. for example, ondeveloper.android.com, we've got this fantasticexample of what standard button mapping looks like. so considersupporting game pads.
and also consider bothphones and tablets when designing touch controls. just because my screenis bigger doesn't mean my fingers are longer. and of course, think of tvs. this means you shouldn'trequire touch at all. and you consider supportingd-pads, at least in your menus. eight, size matters, always. so this is our nexus 6.
it is our biggest,baddest phone, and it has 64 gigs ofonboard storage, up to. that's still not enough. it has a whoppingthree gigs of memory. that's also not enough. so smaller apks tendto get more downloads. use things like multi apk andgpu native texture formats to keep things small in memory. use webp, a distributionsize, as your highest concern.
consider hostingassets for post install to make the initialdownload size smaller. the size in flash matters, too. ok? because people will deletethings that are big. on lower memory devices,adapt by using native texture formats. finally, we can't makebatteries much larger. keep people playingthe game more
by avoiding excessivenetwork use and wake locks. if you need tokeep the screen on, use a window flag,not a wake lock. nine, testing. don't panic. use the matrix. as you can see, with thematrix, it's just five devices. we've tested three screen sizebuckets, five resolutions, four memory configurations,five gpus, five cpus
from five differentmanufacturers. it's not that hard. 10, have fun. build great games. and what do i meanwhen i say that? well, here is an exampleof a featured list from a currentgoogle play session. and if you take a lookat these, they all have something in common.
users love them. ultimately, we want topromote games both we and our users love. so that's it-- 10 things thatwill help you build games that your users will loveand that google play will
want to feature. all right? thank you. [applause]
