GameSpy Technology is pleased to announce that our tools and services for Unity are now Android compatible!
Developers creating games for Android devices can now wield the limitless power that our services offer:
• Player Metrics & Rankings allows you to construct leaderboards, track player stats, and minimize cheating through report authentication
• Data Storage lets you store structured and unstructured data online, allowing players to access content like save games, screenshots, videos, and playable content anywhere that has an internet connection
• Multiplayer Matchmaking connects players wherever they want to play, and can even facilitate cross-platform play to let them connect on whatever platform they prefer
You’ll also find these services easy to integrate courtesy of our GameSpy-Unity C# connector and the lightweight test applications we provide for our various tools.
Accessing our Unity Android SDKs is as easy as signing up for a free account today at poweredbygamespy.com and downloading them from your Developer Dashboard.
Once you’ve downloaded the Unity SDK package, be sure to visit our YouTube channel to watch tutorial videos on integrating our various services – especially our quick, three-and-a-half-minute screencast on working with our Unity C# Connector:
We have more support for the Unity engine planned for the near future. Keep your eyes peeled for more news from us soon!
Capcom’s Street Fighter III: Third Strike Online Edition brings together the fan-favorite Street Fighter III franchise with GameSpy Technology’s cloud storage service to provide players with an online experience that starts inside the game and extends well beyond. Specifically, developer Iron Galaxy Studios worked closely with GameSpy Technology to leverage GameSpy’s cloud storage services to store transcoded gameplay videos from online multiplayer matches and then share those videos via the in-game Match Server or player YouTube channels.
Improving Upon Perfection
Beloved by fighting game aficionados, SFIII is widely regarded as the most technically-challenging game in the series thanks to its simple yet difficult-to-master parrying system. Finally reintroduced to consoles by developer Iron Galaxy Studios in October of 2011 — the game’s first console release in over six years — Street Fighter III: Third Strike Online Edition augments classic gameplay with GameSpy Technology services to add new depth to the player experience.
In porting Street Fighter III: Third Strike to the PlayStation 3, Iron Galaxy Studios made what many fans consider a perfect translation of the game’s arcade version, keeping the core gameplay identical to the game’s original release version while improving graphics and features:
Trials Mode: Players new to Street Fighter III will no doubt find the game’s core gameplay elements — parrying and cancelling moves integral to competitive matches — somewhat daunting. Trials Mode provides a series of challenges for both novice and veteran players to test their skills.
Training Mode: Players can also develop their skills in a standard match environment in Training Mode, fighting in a penalty-free environment with unlimited time and health.
Improved Graphics: high-resolution graphics have become prevalent since SFIII’s original release over a decade ago, and Iron Galaxy Studios brought the game up to par by updating character sprites and backgrounds.
Uploading Videos is a Breeze
Iron Galaxy Studios uses GameSpy Technology’s cloud storage services — powered by our Sake client — to provide SFIII’s most amazing new feature: match replays that can be saved, transcoded, and uploaded directly to YouTube. In the past, video capture has required expensive and often difficult-to-set-up capture cards, severely limiting the accessibility for players to record their matches. SFIII works with our cloud storage services to make those limitations a thing of the past, streamlining the capture and upload process by providing a post-match interface through which players can directly place their matches online for the world to watch.
This all results in a process for sharing videos that requires just a few simple steps from players:
First, players begin a match — online or locally — and complete it.
Each player then has the option of viewing that match’s replay, with the additional option of saving that replay to the console’s hard drive.
A player then has the option of uploading his replay either to the SFIII match server or uploading it to YouTube.
If a player chooses to upload to YouTube, the system prompts him to enter his YouTube user name and password (with the option to save those credentials, if desired).
Once those credentials are entered, the video uploads to that YouTube user’s channel as a private video, giving the user options for how videos get shared and with whom.
As simple as this is for users, our Sake product (the core of our cloud storage service) makes this type of feature easy for developers to integrate as well.
GameSpy cloud storage has two components: the Sake SDK that you integrate into your game’s code and the Sake Web Admin Panel, which is an easily-accessed tools website where developers set up a schema consisting of tables and fields that determine what Sake stores and how users access it. Sake also has a Web-based API, allowing you to integrate cloud-storage-based features like screenshot galleries, user stats, or video galleries to your game’s official website — or anywhere else you want to use your data. Plus, the data that you store in Sake can be virtually anything that players might access or save for a game: saves, player items, RPG blacksmith inventories, and screenshots, or, in the case of SFIII, video replays of player matches. The service allows for user rating of content, and also provides developers with tools for both pro-active and reactive moderation, allowing the community and the game developer both to take a hand in curating shared content.
The GameSpy Technology cloud makes Street Fighter III videos available to watch both at Youtube.com and via SFIII’s in-game video browsing interface. The in-game interface also uses Sake’s rating functionality, and provides an interface allowing players to pause, speed up, and reverse videos. SFIII’s user-generated-videos feature lets players record any match, so if you, too, pull off an unbelievable ten-parry win, you’ll be able to show it off to everybody (and you can even practice for it in Trials Mode).
Meet Your Match
SFIII also makes use of multiplayer matchmaking services to bring players of all skill-levels together to duke it out online in a variety of styles. Traditional matchmaking lobbies and fights are available, but players can also try out Ranked Matches to compete on leaderboards and Tournament Matches to battle against other players to be the best of the best. A series of player-controlled options also lets you determine the criteria for your matches, giving you the choice to allow or forbid certain characters, or to disable specific gameplay mechanics like air-parries.
This kind of multiplayer matchmaking is one of GameSpy Technology’s core services, refined by years of incorporation in hundreds of games. Your players can partake of user-friendly multiplayer features like:
Online and local matchmaking that brings players together automatically or filtered by specific, user-defined criteria.
Matchmaking for both dedicated servers and peer-to-peer games.
Lobbies for chatting and setting up match rules.
In-game buddy functionality and messaging.
Street Fighter III: Third Strike remains the cream-of-the-crop of precise, challenging arcade-style fighters, even though competitors have spent a decade aiming to dethrone it. GameSpy Technology is proud to have worked with Iron Galaxy to make SFIII another standout title in the franchise, and we wish it another decade of dominance.
To begin using GameSpy Technology services in your games today, sign up for a free account today at poweredbygamespy.com.
The Sake Web Admin Panel Demonstration — the next video in our GameSpy Technology Tools Screencast series — is now available to view at our official Youtube channel. Sake, our Cloud-Data Storage Service, is more than a simple database and provides incredibly flexible data storage and retrieval. AAA-title games like Civiliation V (with its ModBuddy feature), Mario Kart Wii (Ghost Races are made possible via Sake), and Red Dead Redemption (which uses Sake to facilitate the game-to-web connectivity for the Rockstar Social Club) use Sake to:
• Store player-specific data like profiles, game saves, and screenshots
• Retrieve User-generated content like custom mods and levels and player icons
• Provide storage and out-of-game retrieval for ATLAS-generated statistics used in leaderboards, Web-based profiles, and mobile apps
• Allow developers to both manually and automatically moderate user-generated content through criteria set up in an easy-to-use Web interface
Sake is a two-part system — the traditional client that integrates directly into your game and the Sake Web Admin Panel, a Web-based administrative tool that lets you manage your Sake schema (the structure of tables and fields that Sake uses to manage information) on the Web without having to deal with the fuss of backend databases. The Sake Web Admin Panel Demonstration will walk you through creating Sake schema, tables, and fields, so that your players can both enrich your game and be enriched by your game’s use of the Sake service.
Watch the Sake Web Admin Panel Demonstration at either the GameSpy Technology Wiki or at our official Youtube channel, then sign up for a free account today at poweredbygamespy.com to get started with the Sake Cloud-Data Storage Service.
For anyone questioning the ability of small, independent studios to produce high-caliber video game entertainment, the crew at Emotional Robots has an answer: Warm Gun.
Set in a futuristic, dystopian version of the Wild West, this first person shooter for the iPhone and iPad delivers the sort of adrenalin-soaked, frenetic action that most gamers used to expect only from big budget PC and console games. More compelling, a team of six full-time (and 4 part-time) developers built the game over the past three-and-a-half years using the Unreal Development Kit, with multiplayer services obtained freely via GameSpy Technology’s “Open” Initiative (which puts the full suite of our online services – from multiplayer to player metrics & rankings to cloud storage – in the hands of start-up studios at no up-front cost).
You can view a trailer, loaded with gameplay footage, here:
Multiplayer works exactly in Warm Gun as you’d expect from any other shooter: dedicated servers host the game online, and players join by browsing through a server browser to locate the optimal host. Players can choose from any of four characters, each equipped with three weapons, and run ‘n’ gun their way through the game’s tried and true deathmatch game mode. New multiplayer modes, like Capture the Flag, Death Match, or Team Death Match, in addition to Warm Gun “exclusives” like “Showdown,” “Great Escape” and “Mad Cap” can be expected in future versions of the game, whether or iOS or elsewhere.
Warm Gun is available for purchase download now via Apple’s iTunes App Store. And, when you’re ready to follow in Emotional Robots’ footsteps, you can sign up for a free GameSpy Technology developer account and start coding your next online masterpiece right here.
Today sees the release of the GameSpy Technology screencast demonstrating the Web Admin panel for our ATLAS service. ATLAS comprises the bulk of our Player Metrics & Rankings service — the system that makes many of the compelling features work in the AAA-titles that incorporate GameSpy Technology clients. ATLAS enables games to track thousands of stats for millions of players, and games like Red DeadRedemption, Command & Conquer 3, and Section 8: Prejudice use ATLAS to:
Construct stats-rich user profiles both in-game and on the Web
Power limitless leaderboards
Facilitate stats-based unlocks to encourage repeat play
Provide anti-cheating measures to protect the value of stats and leaderboards
Developers set up ATLAS using a Web-based interface (the ATLAS Web Admin Panel), which allows them to assemble the working parts of a Ruleset without complicated scripts. ATLAS can also be customized to whatever levels of simplicity or complexity that Developers desire for their games.
We’ve created a screencast showing you the step-by-step process of setting up a Ruleset in the ATLAS Web Admin Panel so that you, too, can partake of the rich (dare we say meaty?) stats-buffet that Player Metrics & Rankings can serve up, and you can watch the video either on the GameSpy Technology Wiki or at our Official Youtube Channel. Sign up today for a free account at poweredbygamespy.com to start using ATLAS and GameSpy Technology’s other client services.
