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Hello, everyone. I'm Gustav,
a Community Manager and Technical PR Specialist
here at ASUS.
I want to welcome you all to this makeshift studio
that we've set up today.
In this session, I'll be covering our ROG Phone SDK
for Unity game development.
I will discuss its key features and how they can be put to use
to make your games even better.
For example, how to use it together with our Kunai Gamepad,
as well as the TwinView Dock that you see here on my side.
Also, some in-game performance controls,
and even the Aura RGB lighting here on the back of the phone,
which can be controlled to make your games
even more immersive.
We've got a lot of things to discuss today,
and I don't want to waste any of your precious time,
so we're going to go ahead and start the presentation right away.
I hope you have a good time.
Today's session is divided up into two main parts.
First, I'll introduce the ROG Phone series
and talk about some of the key features of our gaming phones.
Next, we will take a look at the SDK itself.
We will go through its features one by one
and talk about how we can make your games better.
Finally, I'll do a quick recap of everything we've talked about.
Let's not waste any more time and get started.
We launched our first ROG Phone in 2018,
and it was the fastest phone on the market at that time.
The following year, we launched the ROG Phone II,
which was hailed as the best gaming phone in 2019
with over 25 awards.
And this year, we launched the ROG Phone 3,
a gaming powerhouse and our most powerful phone
as of yet.
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Now, before we go into the SDK itself,
I just want to cover some of the key features
of the ROG Phone series.
Being our flagship gaming phones,
it's all about pushing the gaming experience
as far as it can go, and we do this in a couple of ways.
First, by having outstanding performance
with flagship components all the way around,
especially a high refresh rate display.
With the 144 Hz of the ROG Phone 3,
everyday mobile use is fantastic,
but it really shines when it comes to gaming.
Having a game that actually goes up to 144 FPS
to match this display is a fantastic experience,
and it's hard to go back once you've felt it.
We also provide powerful gaming accessories,
including the Kunai Gamepad and the TwinView Dock,
which I will cover in a second.
And then finally, being part of the ROG family of products
means Aura lighting,
here in the form of the ROG logo on the back of our phones.
Now that we've covered that,
let's go on to the ROG Phone SDK itself
and talk about its features.
They can be divided up into two groups.
First, we allow for direct communication
with both our Kunai Gamepad and our TwinView Dock,
as well as Aura RGB lighting.
We also give developers direct control
over in-game performance,
making it easier for you guys to hit those performance numbers
that you're looking for.
As I said, we're going to go over each and one of these one by one.
Let's start with the TwinView Dock.
The TwinView Dock adds a secondary screen
that, by default, serves as a great way
for players to have group communication
or handle live streaming while they're playing,
much as you would on a PC with a two-screen setup.
Of course, developers can also extend the game display
to cover both screens.
This lets you get really creative when thinking about something
like user interface design.
Dual display is supported by Unity and Android,
but our SDK takes one step further and provides dual touch support,
which practically doubles the screen real estate
at your disposal.
Let's look at some of the examples of how the TwinView can be used
to improve the user experience when playing games
on the ROG Phone.
Let's start off with a racing game, for example.
You need to keep full focus of every turn,
but you also need to keep track of where you're at.
With the TwinView, you can move something like the map
down to the phone screen while keeping the racing
on the TwinView screen,
so full focus while still keeping track of crucial information.
I, myself, have hundreds of hours in
as well as many other strategy games,
so I know how information-heavy those games can be,
which can be a problem when you're doing that on mobile.
With the TwinView, you can move stuff like the minimap
and the scoreboard, and the in-game shop
to the TwinView screen so you can keep your UI looking sleek
with all your abilities on the phone screen.
And finally, gaming on a six-inch display
can sometimes mean that text gets really small and hard to read.
With the TwinView, you can move secondary information
like statistics, mission objectives, settings,
stuff like that, to the secondary screen
and keep fonts crystal clear.
Moving on to the Kunai Gamepad then,
it lets you have that familiar, robust feeling of a console gamepad
when playing on your ROG Phone.
As you can see in the picture, we both allow you to have it
as a standalone gamepad both in wired and Bluetooth mode,
but you can also use it directly on the phone in bumper mode.
The SDK allows you to map all the physical buttons
on the Kunai Gamepad to your in-game controls,
all the analog sticks, the buttons, the triggers, stuff like that,
and the beauty of it is that this is something
that you configure when developing your game.
So when it actually reaches the end user,
they just see it as native Kunai support for your game.
There's no extra configuration required by the end user,
and as Todd Howard likes to say, "It just works."
Finally, we have Aura lighting, which as I said,
is a unique design feature of all ROG products.
Here, it's shown in even grander fashion on the ROG Phone 3
with the Lighting Armor Case.
But it can really amp up the immersion of your game.
And you can add Aura lighting that's triggered by basically
any in-game event that you can think of.
It can be triggered by music, or even by system status stuff
like CPU or GPU temperatures,
battery level, and so forth.
Just to throw an example out there,
say that you're developing a stealth game,
well, then Aura lighting could basically act
as a proximity sensor to show you if enemies are close.
Because you can configure both the color, the speed,
and the style of the Aura lighting effect,
when there are no enemies around,
you can have a strobing effect that's green
showing you that you're in no harm.
And then as enemies come closer,
you can have the colors change from green to yellow,
and finally to red, and you can have the speed increase as well.
When you're in imminent danger,
you have the phone flashing really fast
with a warning red light.
This is really cool because you can take that layer of interactivity
and that information and remove it from the screen
and use the Aura lighting instead.
Where you would otherwise need to have an indicator on the screen
that's saying, "Enemies are around. Shit's about to hit the fan,"
you can remove that and use Aura lighting instead.
Coupled with music, it can create a really immersive experience.
But again, you are the game developers, I'm not,
so it's really up to you guys to get crazy creative with this stuff.
Now, moving on to the in-game performance controls.
We'll start off with performance boost,
which lets you temporarily boost the performance of the phone
during computing-intensive tasks
like massive model rendering, for instance.
What's cool is that you can even reference performance metrics
like FPS and CPU status
and let the SDK decide when to apply the boost.
You can have that help to identify problematic areas
where things get really tense for the system.
This can help improve FPS stability,
which is crucial to allow for that smooth gaming experience
that we all love.
Finally, we have refresh rate control,
which lets developers dynamically control
the refresh rate of the display.
As I just said a couple of minutes ago,
having those 144 Hz of the ROG Phone 3 is amazing.
But gaming on such high refresh rates,
as well as frames per second,
means that you're really pushing the system,
and you won't have, even though we packed a really big battery
into the ROG Phone 3, you will notice the difference.
Instead of choosing one refresh rate, one frame rate,
the SDK allows developers to dynamically control that,
so you can balance performance and power consumption
basically on a scene-by-scene basis.
Say that you're developing an FPS game,
you want the moment-to-moment action when you're in a match
to be really smooth, but you don't need that
when you're in the menus or in the loading screen.
You can balance power consumption
by scaling the refresh rate back down when you're in the menus.
And then once you get in-game, you ramp it back up again.
You can get even more granular than that.
Say that you have a really impressive animation
that you want to have play out buttery smooth,
you can push it up to the max during the animation,
but once it finishes it, you can scale it back down again.
When you're looking at static images, for example,
you don't need those 144 Hz FPS.
This, more than anything, gives developers greater freedom
to push the hardware when it matters most,
but you won't find yourself in a situation where you go,
"Hmm, guys, I think we need to cap the FPS to like 60 or 30
because we don't want anyone to run out of battery
in like two hours because of our game."
To recap then, the ROG Phone SDK basically gives you easy ways
to unleash the full capabilities of the ROG Phone,
both in terms of hardware and all the rich gaming accessories
that we provide.
It also gives you more ways to tackle design challenges,
as I explained with the TwinView Dock.
You can get really creative with how you think about
UI design and stuff like that.
And it also gives you greater control over in-game performance,
as we just mentioned.
More than anything, we want you guys to be able to hit
those performance numbers you're targeting.
Now, before I go, I just want to make a quick mention
of a demo application that we've made.
It's pretty barebones, but we have all the features
that I've talked about today, so you can play around
and see how they work for yourself.
It's included in the free package found on the Unity Asset Store.
You find it by searching for "ROG Phone SDK",
and it should show up.
Now, having said that, I want to thank you all
for attending this Unite Now session on the ROG Phone SDK.
I hope you've learned a lot to help you build your Unity skills
and advance your projects, and we look forward
to your future games here on ASUS.
And of course, feel free to provide us with feedback.
We want to hear your thoughts on how to make our SDK
even better for the future.
Finally, be sure to check out our Unite Now page
for other sessions that are sure to inform and inspire you.
Thank you.
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