ABE HASKINS: Hey, folks.
Welcome to this episode of AskFirebase.
I'm Abe Haskins.
I'm a Developer Programs Engineer on the Firebase team.
And in this very special episode of AskFirebase,
we're going to dive into the questions about AppShip3000.
These are all questions that you asked at Google I/O this year
and we're going to answer them.
Let's get into it.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
SPEAKER 1: Take one.
ABE HASKINS: First question today
is one I got in a bunch of different forms
at Google I/O 2017.
AppShip3000 is ridiculous.
How did you come up with this idea?
Where did it come from, and why did you decide to build it?
So I'll tell you.
One day I was sitting in the office and my coworker Puff,
you might know him--
PUFF: It's me.
[SQUEAKING]
ABE HASKINS: --he showed up and he
said, we need to build a game for Google I/O. I said,
all right.
It's got to be fun.
It's got to be energetic.
You've got to have a teamwork aspect.
And most importantly, it has to teach you
about how awesome Firebase and Google Cloud can be.
So I went home, I came back with some sketches,
and we built that into AppShip3000.
All right, next question.
Our next question is one about technology.
People noticed that we used both Firebase and Google Cloud
inside of AppShip300 and they wanted
to know why we were using both.
And the answer is simply that they both worked well
for different things.
In our case, the rocket ship game, the leaderboard,
and the web companion app were all pure Firebase.
These were Cloud Messaging, real-time database, storage,
all of these Firebase features.
But we also needed something on the back end
to do this heavy lifting.
You might have seen we generate these flight
maps that show exactly where your rocket went
as you play the game.
This is something that didn't quite make sense
to build on Firebase.
So we used a complex data pipeline in Google Cloud
to do this.
If you want to learn more about how we used the power of Google
Cloud in AppShip3000, then you can check out this amazing talk
about data pipelines with Firebase and Google Cloud
that we've linked below.
Next up, this next question is all about the companion web app
we made.
If you haven't played the game, you
might not know that the companion
app is how you sign into the game,
lets you check the leaderboard, and lets you get notifications
when your games are complete.
Now, I personally didn't work that much
on this part of the app.
However, I know someone who did.
He's my buddy Nivco, and he normally sits in Zurich.
But I think if I pull some strings I might be
able to get him here for this.
Give me one second to get him on the phone.
[PHONE RINGING]
Hey, Nivco, yeah.
Yeah, I know it's 4:00 AM, but AskFirebase needs you.
We need help right now.
Can you get here?
NICOLAS GARNIER: Ah, yeah [INAUDIBLE]
ABE HASKINS: Yeah, all right.
Fantastic, I'll see you soon.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
NICOLAS GARNIER: I'm here, Abe.
What's up?
ABE HASKINS: Oh, thank you, man.
Thank you.
I'll hand over to you.
NICOLAS GARNIER: All right, guys.
I'm Nicolas.
I'm based in Zurich and people usually call me Nivco.
So you're going to use the companion web app when you
want to sign in to the arcade.
First, you're going to sign in with your Google
account on the companion web app and we're
going to generate a sign-in code for you.
For this, we use Cloud Functions to trigger on the new outcome
creation.
Using that code, you sing into the arcade
to launch the rockets.
Once the game is done, we're going
to save your score on the real-time database
and display this on the leaderboard.
After a few minutes, we're going to use our Google Cloud
pipeline to generate, as Abe mentioned, a flightpath image.
And we're going to send you a reengagement notification
to let you view that image on the web app.
All right, guys.
That's how we use Firebase on the companion web app.
ABE HASKINS: Awesome, thanks Nivco.
NICOLAS GARNIER: Sure, Abe.
ABE HASKINS: All right, the final question of the day.
Can I play AppShip3000?
And the answer is, yes, you can play it, but not right now.
Sadly, AppShip3000 isn't open source yet
and it's not available on mobile.
That means if you want to play it,
you're going to have to come to one of our events in person.
AppShip is currently traveling the world
getting to different events so that people
like you can sit down and have a blast playing it.
If you want to find out where AppShip
is, you can follow me on Twitter,
follow Firebase on Twitter.
And we're going to keep you up to date on everywhere
it's going.
And I can't wait for you to play it.
That's all for this episode of AskFirebase.
Now, if you want to see the game in action,
we've linked a video below for that.
If you want to learn more about how we built AppShip3000,
there's a link to my blog post, along with that data pipelines
talk I mentioned.
As always, if you have any other questions about Firebase,
about AppShip3000, you can send them
out using that hashtag AskFirebase
and we will get to them in a future episode.
But that's all for now folks.
Thanks for watching.
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