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Posts tagged with "games"

Twitch Announces SDK For Mobile Games

Twitch

Twitch

Video game live streaming service Twitch has announced a mobile SDK, which will allow developers of smartphone and tablet games to add gameplay recording and broadcasting functionalities to their games, taking advantage of many of the features that Twitch supports on the web and home consoles. As reported by Polygon, the mobile SDK hasn’t been released yet, and Twitch’s official press release doesn’t clarify whether or not it’ll be available for both leading mobile platforms, iOS and Android.

Twitch, which passed 45 million unique monthly viewers at the end of 2013 and 10 million installs for its official mobile app, is seeking to expand on as many platforms as possible, building a platform that lets players easily record and broadcast gameplay, while allowing viewers to watch streams and chat through various community features. Launched in June 2011 as a subsidiary of Justin.tv, Twitch now comes pre-installed on Sony’s PlayStation 4; on March 11, a Twitch app will officially launch on Microsoft’s Xbox One with more functionalities than the PlayStation’s counterpart such as video archiving, a split layout for streaming and text chats, and media achievements for spectating games.

According to details shared by Twitch so far, the initial version of the mobile SDK will more closely resemble the experience offered on PC and Xbox One: besides the ability to record gameplay video and audio, Twitch will allow players to capture video from the front-facing camera, capture audio from an internal or external microphone, and archive videos for immediate streaming on Twitch. The SDK will come with settings to control brodcast quality, and there will be chat integration and discovery features to browse and follow live streams from other gamers.

“Facilitating the ability to ‘broadcast anywhere’ by bringing live streaming functionality to mobile has the potential to convert millions of Twitch’s passive viewers into active broadcasters,” said Michael Pachter, video game analyst, Wedbush Securities. “Now that Twitch has cornered the PC and console markets with turnkey broadcast integrations, given the proliferation of gaming due to the massive penetration of mobile devices, they are in a unique position to change the game once again.

The addition of mobile games is interesting for Twitch: the service isn’t available on the 3DS and PS Vita portable consoles, and Twitch has typically been associated with longer, more articulated gameplay experiences granted by dedicated home consoles and PCs. While new console-quality games can be found on Apple’s App Store and Google’s Play Store and ports of older console games are common at this point, it’ll be interesting to see if developers of mobile games that are usually played in short bursts of time will consider adding Twitch streaming functionalities to their games.

On mobile devices, Twitch will also have to take into account technical aspects such as cellular and WiFi streaming, battery life, and hardware fragmentation. On iOS, Apple has traditionally been against solutions to record videos of the device’s screen, although it’s possible that, by leveraging streaming rather than local video archiving, Twitch has figured out ways to enable this sort of functionality.

Details on release date and platform availability of the Twitch mobile SDK aren’t available at this point. You can read Twitch’s press release here, and wait for updates on the Twitch developer website.

Releasing Games Through Apple, Valve, Nintendo And Sony’s Digital Storefronts→

Swedish indie development studio Image & Form has released games for iOS, Nintendo devices, and Steam; next month, they will release Steamworld Dig for PS Vita and PlayStation 4. CEO Brjann Sigurgeirsson spoke to Edge about the differences between digital storefronts, suggesting that Apple could do a better job at selecting and working with indies:

The developer’s experience with Apple – or rather, the lack of it – suggests that the App Store’s greatest strength is also its greatest weakness. “So many games are coming out every day and the largely DIY submission procedures are so effective that it’s impossible for Apple to keep up personal relations,” says Sigurgeirsson. “A year and a half after having released a Game of the Week I met my first Apple representative in person, and many developers probably couldn’t tell you who ‘their’ person is. The ‘right’ Apple e-mail addresses used to be hard currency, real bargaining chips.”

In throwing its doors open and welcoming all comers, Apple has made it easy for developers to release a game, certainly, but perhaps it’s too easy right now. Sigurgeirsson would like to see Apple raise the entry level to the App Store – “make it a tiny bit harder to become a licensed developer, so that the average quality of the games goes up,” he says.

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Flappy Bird Clone Made with Pythonista On iOS→


Following the unfortunate demise of Flappy Bird, hundreds of developers are rushing to release clones of the game on the App Store. Over at the Pythonista forums, however, user “bashedcrab” has created a working clone of Flappy Bird called “Jumpy Octopus”, made entirely with Pythonista (pictured above).

This started out as a Flappy Bird clone (can be done in under 100 lines of Pythonista), but I let my son do a bit of a redesign. He decided an underwater setting involving an Octopus was much more enjoyable.

The game play and physics are tuned to replicate the original Flappy Bird as closely as possible, so it is hard! If you want to make it a bit more fun for young kids, make the gap larger (Default is 360. 450 is much easier but still a challenge for young kids).

The game is available as a Python script here, which can be copied in a new file in Pythonista and run to play the game. Jumpy Octopus has sounds, keeps tracks of high scores, and uses iOS emojis as characters for the underwater setting. Of all the Flappy Bird clones that are coming out, this is an impressive open-source implementation based on Pythonista’s game creation features.

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Eric Pramono’s Tips for Threes→

If you’ve been trying to get high scores in Threes, you’ll want to check out Eric Pramono’s tips and explanation of the point system.

The game score is determined by the numbers and types of tiles you have at the end of the game. Each white tile is worth three times the score of its previous number, for example the 768 tile is worth 19,683 points whereas the 384 tile is only worth 6,561 points.

Fair warning: this may require an even larger investment of your time to play Threes, which is a great game.

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Threes: A Game of Multiples

Threes is a game of multiples. It’s a game of combining pairs of numbers to make even bigger numbers. It plays on idea of a sliding puzzle, except the board becomes more populated the longer you play. A new piece falls onto the board after every slide, until the board is completely populated. The end goal is to end up with a board full of large numbers, hopefully in the greater double digits, and maybe even a triple, for a high score.

You play on a 4 x 4 grid, shaped like mahjong pieces, where you slide pieces up, down, left, and right. The game doesn’t really start until you begin combining your blue ones and red twos to create threes. Threes combine to make sixes, which combine to make twelves, etc. Every time you combine two numbers, the result doubles. Only multiples of three count towards your end score, thus the name of the game.

While Threes is largely a game about numbers, there’s lots of little touches in the game, including an unintended achievement system, where creating bigger multiples of three unlocks new personalities. Each multiple of three has a different face, and they’ll smile at each other if they can combine. Threes maintains a history of your previous scores, and includes a toggle to reduce animation frame-rate to save battery life if you’re out and about.

If you love games like Letterpress and Dots, you’ll love Threes. It’s easy to grasp and hard to master. It’s classy.

Threes is $1.99 on the App Store.

Hoplite: A Mini Dungeon Turn-Based Strategy Game for iPhone and iPad

Each step feels more perilous than the last. As you dash over a pool of lava, you lunge to slay a demon archer, cornered and unprepared for the daring attack. Looking ahead it seems all but impossible to make the last jump, as demon footmen move to block the exit. Throwing your spear, you impale the dark beast, only to be greeted by a bomb that lands behind your feet. You bash away the bomb with your shield, taking out another demon as it explodes at a distance. Leaping across the last chasm, a lapse in judgement leaves you directly in the crosshairs of a second archer, who fires an arrow directly into your exposed side as you land.

And thus ends the quest for the Fleece.

This is Hoplite, where a pair of sandals, a trusty spear, sturdy shield, and three hearts are all that protect you from hordes of demons in the Underworld. Your quest is to recover the Fleece and make it out alive, but the journey is treacherous.

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Rymdkapsel Now on Mac and PC

There aren’t too many games that get my attention, but rymdkapsel was one of them. It was the right kind of addicting eerie fortress defense meets Tetris meets what-are-these-monoliths that brought something unique and different to the touchscreen. The game’s back, now available on Mac, PC, Linux, through Steam or the rymdkapsel page.

The desktop edition of the game includes new game modes: Plus mode features four new mysterious monoliths to unlock, and Zen mode removes the invading space aliens from the game for a meditative experience.

A special Monolith edition of the game is exclusively available from the developer, and includes DRM free versions of the game for all desktop platforms, a Steam code, the original Android version of the game, a complete 45 minute soundtrack, ringtones, and a bonus game for the PC (Windows) version.

Rymdkapsel is available for $7.99 through the Humble Store and on Steam. The Monolith edition of the game is $11.99 and exclusively available on the Humble Store. You can also get the soundtrack separately on Bandcamp for €4.

Stockfish For Mac with Chess Analysis→

Developed by Daylen Yang, Stockfish is a free and open-source chess app for Mac based on the Stockfish chess engine.

The app does a couple of interesting things: it’s Retina-ready and it can go full-screen, so you’ll enjoy a chess game on your MacBook Pro’s display without distractions. It supports two-player games and it’s got exporting capabilities and keyboard shortcuts. But more importantly, it comes with advanced chess analysis that lets the computer tell you who’s winning and calculate the best move. I’m fascinated by the technological premise: the app can let you choose to optimize analysis for maximum performance so that more cores will be used to compute chess analyses; even the amount of memory to use can be adjusted. It should be pretty impressive on a new Mac Pro.

Stockfish is free on the Mac App Store and open-source. The Stockfish engine is available here.

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The Evolution Of Simogo→

From Lee Bradley’s profile of Simogo at Eurogamer:

Go back a decade, however, and the art, design and audio half of Simogo wasn’t even interested in making games. In the early 2000s, while working as an animator on movies and commercials, Simon Flesser felt that games were in a pretty uninteresting place. Then, in 2004, the Nintendo DS arrived with its touch-sensitive screen and a new set of inputs. His imagination was lit.

I loved Year Walk last year, but I still haven’t played DEVICE 6. I remember how different Another Code felt to me when it came out in 2005, and Simogo’s games have the same effect – they are uniquely designed for a platform and a multitouch screen, rather than just tweaked for them.

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