Friday 17 May 2013

Google Play game services official, aims to bring social & cloud features to games


As Sundar Pichai had hinted in his Wired interview, the major part of Google I/O keynote was devoted to developers. During one of the dev-focussed parts of keynote, Google announced the new Play game services – a suite of gaming services for game developers, which make it easy to include social features in mobile games.

Google Play game services are however not just limited to integration of social features, they also provide support for storing game saves and settings in the cloud and it is all done on Google’s servers.

Available as a free SDK, Google Play game services will allow devs to include features like above-mentioned cloud save as well as multiplayer gaming, leaderboards, and achievements to their games. According to Google, these services can work on Android devices running on versions 2.0 or above.

Google Play game services provide backend support to game developers unlike the competing Apple Game Center, which is more like a standalone app.

“Today, we launched a range of new tools, including services for game developers. For users, this means that you’ll be able to challenge your friends on Google+ to real-time multiplayer competitions, or race against them to the top of the leaderboards,” noted Hugo Barra in a blog post.

If you are a game developer, you will have immediate access to integrate Play game services in your games. Some of the games have already incorporated it, like World of Goo, Super Stickman Golf 2, Beach Buggy Blitz, Kingdom Rush, Eternity Warriors 2 and Osmos.

The game developer can not only use Google Play game services for Android, but also for iOS games.  For more, check out the developer website.

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