Continue to help your game development | 2021 Google Game Developers Summit

Author/Greg Hartrell, Director of Product Management, Google Play and Android

△ 2021 Google Game Developer Summit continues to help your game development

Last year, we witnessed that Android and Play have reached a new level, and more and more people can play games without leaving home. We have always made Google Play a more consumer-friendly platform, allowing game developers to have more opportunities to connect with diverse global users through the Google Play platform. In fact, the number of monthly active devices for Android has reached 3 billion, while the number of monthly active users for Google Play has grown to 2.5 billion, and the number of global installations has reached 140 billion.

At Google, we provide services for everyone, and we are committed to helping all developers reach players at the right time: whether it is a large game studio or an independent development team, they can create interesting and novel games all over the world.

At this Game Developers Summit, we shared a series of updates to tools and solutions to help you throughout the life cycle of the game business. We have also announced the launch of new tools that make game development easier. The ever-evolving ecosystem update will allow your game to reach more devices, and it is also a new opportunity to promote your market success on Google Play.

We have summarized the wonderful content shared in this event and a quick start guide for you——

Simplified development process

• We launched the Android Game Development Kit (AGDK), which includes a series of tools and development libraries to help you develop, optimize and deliver high-quality Android games. In the initial release, AGDK covered three main areas:

1. Integrated workflow tools (e.g. a new Visual Studio extension)
2. Basic C/C++ game library (e.g. new game text input library)

3. Performance optimization (such as the framework performance profiler support of our GPU performance profiler and the new load time support of Android Performance Tuner)

   • We are working on two new areas in Android 12. The game information center will provide an overlay experience that allows users to quickly access key tools during the game, such as screenshots and records. We will launch the above experience on selected devices later this year. With Game Mode API , you can react when players choose different performance configurations for the game: for example, to save battery consumption during a long commute, or to get the highest frame rate through performance mode. You can integrate the game mode API through the Beta version before Android 12 is released.
   • Reach and devices is a new data and insight tool that can help you achieve more success on Google Play. This tool can help you understand and predict the distribution of users and technical issues in different regions and key device attributes (such as Android version, memory, graphics stack, and chipset). You can use it to provide business cases for different regions and equipment target decisions, to discover optimization opportunities, and to set test priorities for your next version.
   • Firebase Remote Config allows you to update the game play and appearance interface for different target devices without having to release a new version. The new personalization features are now available for access through the 16102b46a737d5 Firebase Alpha Edition plan . This tool uses Google’s machine learning capabilities to automatically provide the best experience for each of your users.

More devices

• Last year, on Chrome OS , Google Play usage increased by 300%. This is the year with the highest usage rate of apps and games since we released Google Play on Chromebooks in 2016. Unity recently introduced support for Chrome OS on Unity 2021.2 and will support Unity 2020 LTS later this year. In order to better reach the rapidly growing user base, please optimize your game and join the growing ranks of Chrome OS developers.

harvest

• Play as you download , this tool is built into the kernel of Android 12, allowing users to download game materials in the background while entering the game in a few seconds. We are happy to see that the speed of loading and opening the game is at least twice as fast as before, which improves the user experience.
• We will continue to innovate in Play Asset Delivery to ensure that players can reduce waiting time without sacrificing game quality. Now, the texture compression format positioning will automatically find a suitable modern compression format to further reduce the size of your game.
• You can use the score and evaluation Play Management Center to help you understand the game's ratings on different devices and configurations in a new way, and you can access and query your rating history and new rating history. index.
• We have updated the pre-registration function in the Play Store, which is more practical. Now you can use pre-registered app campaigns to increase the appeal of your game in open beta or to promote pre-registration of your game in the Play Store.
• The new Play Integrity API by helping you confirm whether to use genuine game binaries installed by Google Play on a real Android device. If you are interested in experiencing the Play Integrity API first, you can participate in the test 16102b46a739b0.

You can read the article to learn about the full content of the 2021 Google Game Developer Summit, or visit the official guide more updates. Also welcome to continue to follow the "Google Developer" and "Android Developer" official WeChat public accounts to get the latest Android game development resources at any time.