At this year’s Google Game Developer Summit, we’re bringing developers updates and updates on tools and services designed to help you build high-quality gaming experiences and grow your game business. This article will show you in detail how to use them and help your game succeed.
Build a high-quality Android game experience using the Android Game Development Kit
We are committed to supporting you in building a high quality Android gaming experience, simplifying your development process and providing in-depth analysis of how to improve the performance and stability of your games by continuously improving developer tools and SDKS. We also work with various game development engines, including our own native C/C++ engine, to help achieve this goal. Last year, we released the Android Game Development Kit (AGDK), a set of tools and libraries that can help you develop, optimize, and deliver high-quality Android games, and we’ve made a number of updates to the AGDK based on developer feedback. Check out this video for the latest updates on the Android Game Development Kit (AGDK).
First, we’ve added some new updates to Visual Studio’s Android Game Development Tools Extension pack (AGDE). While AGDE is particularly useful for developers developing games in C or C++, there are often some android-based development efforts that require Java. We found that switching between C debugging and Java debugging was cumbersome, and it became even more so when developers tried to migrate projects between Visual Studio and Android Studio. To make this switch or migration easier for developers, AGDE now includes cross-compatibility between Android Studio and Visual Studio. This will save developers time trying to recreate projects in Android Studio or maintain two projects in parallel. We will also be adding AGDE support for Visual Studio 2022 and will soon be rolling out the many performance and functionality improvements you have been asking for. Watch the video to learn how to optimize your game with Android tools.
Second, we have a new Memory Advice API (Beta) for the Android Game Development Kit (AGDK), where Memory management can be quite challenging. Your game is often at risk of being terminated by a low memory termination daemon (LMK) when there are other applications running in the background, and you don’t have much telemetry data to tell what’s going on. By using the new Memory Advice API, your game can determine at runtime how much more Memory it consumes before being terminated by LMK. Based on this runtime information, you can choose to immediately reduce the memory usage of your game by, for example, changing the LOD (level of detail in the grid) used by your game, or you can simply collect telemetry data to understand the resource usage of your game on memory-constrained devices and plan your game content accordingly. Watch the video to learn more about the Memory Advice API.
Finally, there’s an update to the Android GPU Inspector (AGI), the first platform-level GPU performance analyzer released for Android, which is critical to knowing when a game hits a GPU bottleneck, improving frame rates, and extending battery life. Last year, we added a component to AGI and released a Beta version of the Frame Profiler for early adopters to help identify which render channels are slowing down the game and understand how resource and Graphics API usage affects Frame performance. We are now releasing the Frame Profiler for all developers to help you improve your game performance. Watch the video to learn how to optimize GPU usage with The Android GPU Inspector.
New tools and services drive sustainable growth in the games business
Coverage and Equipment (Reach & D**** Evices)
Google game developers summit last year, we launched “coverage and equipment tools,” is this Play management center in a decision making tool, can press a variety of different device attributes according to the user and distribution activities, so that you can more wisely decided to according to what are the specifications of the equipment development and application, which will be applied to place, And what to test.
Currently, the “Reach and Equipment” tool displays installed metrics as a way to measure business opportunities. But if your primary focus is revenue, you might want to pay attention to how well your game reaches non-paying and paying users with different spending characteristics. To that end, we’ve enhanced the tool to include revenue metrics and comparisons with similar apps. You can use this expected revenue and growth rate data to evaluate when you are choosing which technical problems to solve or making investment decisions about which channels to distribute equipment to. You can watch the video to learn more about this feature and related updates, and you can try it out in the Play Administration center right now.
Android Vitals
Quality is key to success on Google Play, and the quality and stability of your game can affect player churn, discoverability and promotion in the App Store, and even whether users actively recommend your game.
For this, you can use Android Vitals to monitor and improve the technical quality of your app or game. This tool provides reports on key issues that affect users so you can debug and prioritize issues. Of the top 1,000 games on Google Play, 70% use Android Vitals regularly.
One of the most popular requests we have received for Vitals functionality involves developing country/territory level exploration of Vitals metrics and programmatic access to them. In response to developer feedback, we provide a “country/region” segmentation dimension for all metrics in Android Vitals. You can filter all metrics to the country/region level in Android Vitals and the “Reach and Devices” tool. To better design the user experience by country, you can also know which countries to focus on to address crash rates and ANR (application unresponsiveness) issues on various devices.
In addition, we’ve released the Developer Reporting API for all developers, giving you programmatic access to your own Android Vitals core metrics. With this new API, developers can retrieve Vitals metrics and problem data, such as the incidence, number of crashes and ANR events, categories, and stack traces. For more information and documentation about the Google Play Developer Reporting API, click here.
Firebase Crashlytics and Firebase Remote Config personalization
Firebase Crashlytics and Firebase Remote Config are two very useful tools for developers regarding game quality and stability.
Crashlytics is Firebase’s mobile crash reporting tool that helps you track stability problems, prioritize them, and resolve them faster.
We’ve improved Crashlytics to make it easier to debug your game, to help you understand more about crashes in C++ code, and to include a wider variety of native platform crash types to report, as well as deeper stack traces to help you quickly debug and fix problems. Finally, these native crash information enhancements have been added to the Firebase Unity SDK to locate C++ code crashes back to your C# code, making it easier to troubleshoot problems. Watch the video to learn more about how to use Crashlytics for Unity to enhance stability in mobile games.
Firebase Remote Config’s latest personalization features are now available in Beta form. Personalization uses powerful machine learning techniques to automatically determine the best experience for each user, leading to the best results. For example, the feature can automatically determine which players are best suited to encourage social sharing interactions. Game studios such as Halfbrick and Ahoy Games are already using personalization to boost revenue and ratings, largely without intervention from their teams.
Strategic Guidance on Revenue Generation
When we talk to developers, we find that many teams have difficulty analyzing and focusing on lower-level metrics with background information; In fact, these metrics can be directly optimized within the game and are relevant to the overall performance of the game.
To that end, we’ve specifically launched a “Strategy Guide” feature in the Google Play Admin center to help as many game developers as possible scale up.” The “Strategy Guide” provides an intuitive interface to help developers better understand how their game is monetizing. Developers only need to use the Google Play Billing API to make this feature work.
You can also watch videos on how diversity and inclusion can be embedded in game design and distribution.
In-app Offers offer early access
As a game developer, you’re always looking for the right moment to upsell to your players and try to get them to make the next purchase in your game without alienating them.
To that end, we’ve opened up our in-App Offer system and API for game developers.” “In-app Offers” are designed to make the price more attractive by offering discounts and offers on Google Play to attract players to make a first or repeat purchase. With in-app offers, you can select the scene where your player is likely to make a purchase while playing the game. Show them what Google Play offers, like discounts or points.
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