Modern mobile devices are amazing tools for gaming.
They give you this great experience,
right on the screen, with tons of sensors
to capture touch and gestures to enhance your gaming experience.
With all this technology, wouldn't it
be great if you could experience the fun
of playing a game in the same room as your friends?
My name is Nathan Camarillo.
And with Google Cast games, you can recapture that magic
of sitting down in your house, and playing
a great game with your friends, all on your own devices.
So what is a Google Cast Game?
A Google Cast Game enables multiscreen game play
between mobile devices and television.
When you combine the biggest screen
in the house with an amazing controller,
great things can happen.
But making a great game with Google Cast
is more than just linking your devices together.
So I'm here with a few handy design tips
to help you make your game night even more successful.
One of the most critical points in making
a Cast Game is simply, how does someone find and join a game?
The way to accomplish this is to make sure
that your game can find nearby Cast devices,
and automatically present the user with the option
to Cast as part of the game set up flow.
Thankfully for you, the developer,
this is easy to enable.
Just set up the game with the Google Cast SDK.
One thing I want you to remember when you're making your game
is that you need to decide where you can play your game.
If you're making a game that can be played on the mobile device,
away from the television, we call this a Cast enabled game.
It's the kind of game you can play on the go, away from home,
but then connect when there's a Cast device available.
If the game can only be played as part of the Google Cast
experience, we call this a Cast required game.
No matter which Cast technology solution
you choose for your game, these are two universal concepts
that apply to all games.
Now let's look at a spectrum of game controls.
Abstract controls interacts with action
on the screen via some other mechanism,
such as motion, or touch anywhere.
Think of a sports game, or a driving game.
I can swing a racket or a baseball bat,
or use the device like a steering wheel.
The power of this type of control
is that everyone intuitively knows how to do these actions,
and being active in the game is often very fun.
Abstract controls also cover simple games,
where you tap anywhere on the screen to make a character move
or jump.
While the interaction is very, very simple,
this, too is very easy for people to learn quickly.
Direct controls occur when you touch
the thing you want to interact with,
like a button or a slider.
This would happen in a game where
you were answering quiz questions,
or casting spells by tapping on bottles of potion.
Your focus needs to temporarily be on the device,
but this is a great way to utilize private information
in your game design.
Virtual controls are somewhere in between.
You touch something on the device
to control something else on the screen.
This would be like a game pad with virtual buttons.
In this case, the player needs to understand
how the device screen is being used,
and if there are specific gestures, or touch regions,
or different actions that need to be used.
Once you've decided on the game's input method,
consider the key characteristics of the game.
What is the pace?
Is there public versus private information, like poker?
Is there multi-player?
Being aware of how these characteristics will affect
game play will help you make decisions around the input
mechanics and how to display information
on both the mobile device and the television.
For visual design, remember not to fatigue the player
by making them constantly look up and down.
Design the television's experience
to be viewed from across the room.
And remember that mobile design needs
to be great at a distance less than arm's length.
It's important to understand this relationship
between devices, as well as what to emphasize differently
on each.
How are your devices and the Google
Cast endpoint going to connect to each other?
We have two solutions for you, but each one
has different implications.
First, let's talk about how Cast applications work.
The first model is what we call a Receiver Cast game.
An app running on the sender, which is your mobile device,
connects to receiver device, which
is any Cast device, like a Chromecast,
and passes along the ID of an application to load.
The receiver loads that application,
written in HMTL5 and JavaScript from the cloud.
In this model, we recommend using the Game Manager
APIs for Google Cast, which is part of the Google Cast SDK.
Game Manager APIs make it faster and easier
for game developers like yourself to Cast enable
their apps across all the devices
we support-- Android, iOS, Chrome browsers--
and get those devices connected to a Chromecast or an Android
TV.
We want you to do what you do best,
and that's make great games.
So we provided this code to help you get your Cast Game started.
Now, you might be asking yourself,
we have this giant TV, a Chromecast,
and we have this amazing computer in our pocket.
Couldn't we do a little bit more?
Of course we can.
That's why we created the Remote Display APIs for Google Cast.
There's millions of mobile devices
with powerful GPUs and sensors ready to send
amazing, interactive content to the largest screen in the home.
With the Remote Display APIs for Google Cast,
this is now possible.
Remote Display for Android and iOS
allows app developers to take full advantage
of the multiscreen Google Cast model.
Integrating Remote Display means you
can harness all those increasingly powerful CPUs
and GPUs in your phone and build dual display games, where
you use the phone to render both a local display
and a virtual one.
And we handle displaying the virtual display
on the large screen via our Cast protocol.
If you think about it, this makes total sense.
Why not harness the power of something
in your hand to send a great image to the TV?
This allows you to create games using cutting edge
3D graphics with AAA effects and HD textures,
and send that amazing world to the television.
We have many great games like "Just Dance Now," "Big Web
Quiz," and "SCRABBLE Blitz," as well
as some sample apps available, which
utilize the methods we just covered to make great games.
Just like these games, your real creative genius
shows itself when you combine great social multi-player
with the power of mobile devices and the big screen.
When you do it all right, you create an entirely new living
room experience, and players really
get involved in the game.
We've seen this happen with several great Cast games
already, and we want yours to be next.
Visit developers.google.com/cast to learn more.
We provide you with the SDK, sender SDKs for Android, iOS,
and Chrome, sample apps that help you get started,
game debugger apps and a debug UI for the receiver,
UX guidelines for Cast games, and all the SDK
documentation and reference.
There are so many unexplored games just
waiting to be created to inspire and excite millions of gamers.
Go make something awesome.
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