Ok this sounds weird. Google play games was made for games. And it is excellent. Achievements, cloud save, etc.
Now my app is NOT a game. But it is well documented and researched that turning chores/work/etc into games, makes them more fun, and people more likely to want to do them.
And this is what I want to do for my app. I cant add it to the games section, as it is a productivity/utility app. Yet I would like to add achievements,etc to it. And seeing as Google Play Games services already has some of the functionality i need, i thought i could use it. However, it seems that your app must be a game to use it.
Any one know if you can actually use the services with non games?
It's technically possible but in circumstances where you are using the services in an app, be careful because if your app doesn't meet the branding requirements, it can be pulled from the Play store as described in the Google Play Games Services terms of service.
So long as you can follow the Google Play Games Services Branding Guidelines you should be fine.
Yes, you can. The Google staff speaking in an event yesterday in the Google Campus London actually said this.
For examples of already existing popular such apps, checkout Memrise which is a gamified way to learn languages. It sits in "Education" App category and it has leaderboards and achievements in it, though not sure if its GPG or their own implementation of it.
Related
Does Google Play Games has a batch-uploader for Achievements/Leaderboards like Apple's ITMSTransporter?
I have 64 Achievements, 13 Leaderboards, 12 different localizations with a title, description and image to upload. I don't really want to manually copy-paste over 3000 items.
I had to end up hacking together my own solution to this, using the Chrome javascript console. Very disappointing there doesn't seem to be an official tool or API for this.
You can see the sourcecode for my hacky solution here: https://github.com/zzymyn/gpg-batch-uploader
This is an old question, but I faced the same problem recently (had a huge list of achievements with several localizations that I needed to upload).
There's no ready-made solution but I created my own by leveraging the Play Games Services Publishing API (https://developers.google.com/games/services/publishing/). It's a REST API that lets you create and modify achievements and leaderboards. They have clients for several languages, I used the one for Ruby which is what I'm most used to.
It's a bit tricky to set up because the calls need authorization (OAuth 2) and the documentation is not very detailed (I figured out most stuff just by reading their code and samples), but the good part is that once you get it working you get a lot of flexibility.
Is it somehow possible to set the public leaderboard to be the default one.
I am talking about the option when you show your leaderboard where is like
Social - All
I cannot find any option in Playstore's Game Services.
At this stage the API getLeaderboardIntent() does not allow you to set the filter for the leaderboard at launch. It is probably a workflow that is enforced by Google to promote adding friends to your G+ circles, but it makes for a really crappy experience when the player is the entry in their social leaderboard.
Hopefully this is made more flexible in a future update to play services.
At the risk of this question being marked 'research' or 'too broad', I am placing this question here with the research I have done so far (to count as background work), especially since I have been researching this for a while but have not found a good turnkey solution. thank you for your inputs!
I want to make Turn Based Multiplayer Game. I found Google Play Game Services but that only works with Google+ Login: https://developers.google.com/games/services/android/turnbasedMultiplayer
How do I do the same with Facebook login? Can Google Play Game Services be used with Facebook friends?
In my research, the other option I found is nextpeer.com, but not sure if they can do a turn by turn based. I think i have to send player to player messages directly to achieve the turn based player, dont want to do that.
EDIT: After I posted the question, i found Android Games Tutorial with Facebook SDK - trying to understand if turn based game can be done using Facebook SDK.
Can it?
Disclaimer: I am a Nextpeer employee.
Hi,
Nextpeer does not offer a turn based solution at the moment. However, we do have an asynchronous gaming mode in our Facebook matches mode. In this mode players can either play synchronously together or asynchronously. In the second case, a player can play and the recording of his gameplay will be played to his opponents when they choose to play. Does this answer your need?
I'll be glad to discuss further privately, just email us at support#nextpeer.com and ask to talk to Dror.
I have been looking for a solution on similar lines aswell, and I guess we have a solution that can be helpful for others as well. Just looking forward to integrate it. You can find the required documentation here
I have released a game that uses Google Game Services on Google Play. Everything works, but when I look on my game in Google Play it doesn't show that it's using Game Services. Some other games do (like Riptide GP for instance). What is controlling this?
Implementing the Google Play Game Services features is not sufficient, your users have to use the service for you to get the badges.
Let me quote from this video from Google I/O 2013: Practical Android Games Development
http://youtu.be/ZbQWf7C5ymU?t=23m39s
"As you get more users you will get badges. [...] However, they are not just given out because you put them in the config, and we don't snoop your APK to see if you are making API calls from there. We verify how much the feature is being used and if you meet certain threshold we give you a badge. So you need to actually integrate it, it is not a token thing that you can put there to get more eyeballs in the store."
I want to add achievements to my app. I started doing such my way, but after the last release, with the new Games API, I've seen it looks clearly better than coding all by myself. What I don't know if there are clauses that avoid using the Game API for regular apps rather than games.
PS: I've checked twice the Games Services website, but nothing appears there.
I don't see any problem with that!
This concept is called gamification:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamification