ZGE as official OUYA engine

Rado1 · Post by **Rado1** » Wed Mar 12, 2014 5:16 pm

Hi,

encouraged by successful experiments and implementation of the support for OUYA and other Android gamepads in ZGE, see this forum post, I asked OUYA support for including ZGE to the official list of OUYA engines. And...

... they warmly agreed!

What needs to be done now:

- to provide a controller example that will be added to the OUYA SDK examples; https://github.com/ouya/ouya-sdk-examples. I pointed to the controller demo I implemented for OUYA in the aforementioned forum post, but please, if you have some more ideas for demos/examples, just publish them. Maybe some existing ZGE example reworked for OUYA controller can also be used (?).

- writing a doc for the ZGE "engine". Tim Graupmann from OUYA offered to write it by himself, but here I would rather ask someone of you to provide the "official texts"; e.g., Kjell, Ville, ...

- afer that, Tim will added a ZGE-related category to the OUYA forum and there should be nice to open some discussion there. This is an opportunity for us to be active supporters of ZGE at OUYA forums. Ideally, the discussions about ZGE should be moved to this forum...(?)

- more technical work: add OUYA/Android controller support to the official ZGE distribution. This is the task for Ville; Ville, I'm sorry for that but we are trying to help you as much as possible.

- produce games, demos, apps for OUYA. I'm working on some new projects for which I plan to make also OUYA versions, but they will not be available sooner than in one month. So please help me! Jph, Ats, all, what abut to create OUYA versions of your previous or currently prepared projects? What about to show the OUYA developers that ZGE is really very fast and convenient environment for creating games?

Any comments are welcome.

BTW who of you has OUYA?

Rado1.

Post by **Kjell** » Wed Mar 12, 2014 6:08 pm

Hi Rado1,

What about OUYA’s In-App Payment API? Don't you need that in order to allow any purchases?

Although you won't need that for games that are entirely free obviously.

K

Rado1 · Post by **Rado1** » Wed Mar 12, 2014 6:14 pm

Hi Kjell,

of course, In-App Purchasing (IAP) is necessary for paid products (whole applications or just parts; e.g., new items, energy, etc.). I'm just looking at the API and have an idea to create an external library for IAP. However, it's not a blocker for including ZGE to the list of OUYA engines.

Post by **VilleK** » Thu Mar 13, 2014 8:12 am

Ok you've convinced me, I will make a go at making the Android API levels in ZGE selectable

But it will probably take a week or so before I have time to look at it.

Rado1 · Post by **Rado1** » Thu Mar 13, 2014 8:18 am

Thanks Ville.

Post by **Kjell** » Thu Mar 20, 2014 4:12 pm

Hi guys,

Ouya just announced they will be dropping the free-to-try requirement.

http://www.ouya.tv/its-about-choice/

Not sure how the "choose between a free-to-try or paid model" will be reflected in the API though.

K

Rado1 · Post by **Rado1** » Fri Mar 21, 2014 5:52 pm

Kjell wrote:Not sure how the "choose between a free-to-try or paid model" will be reflected in the API though.

AFAIK, free-to-play should be implemented by game developer, it's not specially part of API. The only change is that developers are not obliged to provide free-to-play for their paid games, they can choose any mode of payment.

Post by **Kjell** » Fri Mar 21, 2014 8:09 pm

Hmm,

Rado1 wrote:The only change is that developers are not obliged to provide free-to-play for their paid games, they can choose any mode of payment.

Don't you think they would introduce ( at least ) some kind of indication whether a game is paid-only in the OUYA store? Having to download & run a game in order to find that out would be terribly inconvenient.

K

Rado1 · Post by **Rado1** » Sat Mar 22, 2014 8:39 am

Kjell wrote:Don't you think they would introduce ( at least ) some kind of indication whether a game is paid-only in the OUYA store? Having to download & run a game in order to find that out would be terribly inconvenient.

The indicator is put on OUYA portal even now - the game info page can contain the button "Buy" if browsed from OUYA device. You can download and run the game, but it can block some part or the whole game unless you buy it. I expect that for future OUYA can block downloading before buying for the games/apps which require it. But I think it is just the matter of OUYA portal, not API. At the moment, OUYA developers are free to implement purchasing mechanisms on their own; e.g. to block levels, items, or implement time restriction (free-to-play).

Anyway, I'm permanently checking the ODK API changes and will adopt the IAP implementation for ZGE when available; I'm still working on it.

Ats · Post by **Ats** » Fri Apr 04, 2014 10:49 am

Hi everyone, I'm back home. I had a lot of work recently...

So awesome Rado1

I'm going to implement your OUYA contoller mod to my game. Unfortunatly, it's still in an early stage of development so I'll push it to the OUYA store only when it will reach a playable beta state. Maybe I'll find some time to make another little game or demo as a proof of concept for ZGE to be an excelent game creation environment.

Thank you Rado1 !!!

Rado1 · Post by **Rado1** » Sun Apr 13, 2014 5:20 pm

Next step toward supporting OUYA in ZGE has been made: enabling In-App Purchasing (IAP) and storage functionality. For more info see this topic.

If you have got OUYA, please try this extension out and help me with implementation of OUYA games and apps. A good starting point would be to create some demos and tutorials. Or at least, do you have any ideas for good demo projects and tutorials? What about to rework your older projects to OUYA?

It would also be nice to produce video tutorials for OUYA development topics. Unfortunately, I have no skills to prepare, record, mix, post-process good videos, but I can help with the content and know-how.

jonaspm · Post by **jonaspm** » Thu Apr 17, 2014 3:18 am

Super nice achievment! congratulations! I still haven't bought my OUYA... but i will!

Rado1 · Post by **Rado1** » Thu Apr 17, 2014 6:10 am

jonaspm wrote:Super nice achievment! congratulations! I still haven't bought my OUYA... but i will!

Thanks! OUYA is a nice piece of Android hardware and it is easy to develop for it, especially with ZGE

Comparing to ordinary Android development, you do not need to care about different screen sizes/ratios, performance issues, etc. If the game is running on your device, then it runs everywhere.

I strongly recommend to obtain this relatively cheap device and to use ZGE to produce games and apps. In addition, you can earn some money...

Rado1 · Post by **Rado1** » Fri Apr 25, 2014 5:00 pm

ZGE has been recognized as an official OUYA engine today!

ZGE's page in the ODK documentation: http://devs.ouya.tv/developers/docs/zgameeditor
ZGE's topic on the OUYA devel forum: http://forums.ouya.tv/categories/zgameeditor-on-ouya

If you are OUYA developer, please create games/apps, contribute to the forum, have a fun!

jonaspm · Post by **jonaspm** » Wed Apr 30, 2014 7:36 am

ZGE is not in the list anymore

why?
https://devs.ouya.tv/developers/docs/zgameeditor