Posted by Stewart Miles, Fun Propulsion Labs*

To celebrate the holiday season at Fun Propulsion Labs, we're trading our sushi mats and baking pans for candy canes and snowballs. Please join us for a special holiday-themed version of Pie Noon and Zooshi! Zooshi and Pie Noon are open source, cross-platform games built from a suite of libraries that eager C++ developers can use to build their own projects.

You can download and run Zooshi's Santa mode on Google Play and find the latest open source release on our GitHub page. The holiday version of Pie Noon is available on Google Play as Snowdown in Santa Tracker and on our GitHub page. Happy Holidays!

* Fun Propulsion Labs is a team within Google that's dedicated to advancing gaming on Android and other platforms.

Posted by Stephanie Taylor, Open Source Programs Editors Note: We're celebrating Computer Science Education Week through December 13, and hope to inspire students to explore CS all year long. Code-in is a great opportunity for students to start on their 'second hour of code' and beyond.

For the sixth year running, starting today, teens from around the world will have the chance to learn and develop new CS skills by competing in Google Code-in (GCI). By working on real software projects—with help from mentors along the way—students just starting out with Computer Science can begin to investigate and discover the countless opportunities at their fingertips through code.

During the seven weeks of Google Code-in, pre-university students (ages 13-17) can browse hundreds of tasks created by 14 open source organizations. Students then get to choose the tasks they find most intriguing. A wide variety of skills and interests are required to make any software project work, so the tasks in Google Code-in are designed to reflect that diversity. Students can choose to work on projects across documentation, coding, training, research, quality assurance, user interface and outreach tasks.

The 14 organizations students can work with during the contest encompass many fields: health care for developing countries, learning activities for elementary students, desktop and portable computing, the encouragement of young women in computer science, game development, to operating systems used in satellites and robots.

Each task has at least one mentor assigned to it - not only to review the student’s work, but to help answer questions along the way. Each organization also offers beginner tasks that give students who are newer to open source development an easy and clear place to get started. Another goal of the contest is to encourage students to find a coding community that they enjoy working with and hopefully become an active contributor for years to come.

Over the last 5 years, over 2,200 students from 87 countries have successfully completed tasks by participating in Google Code-in. To celebrate CS Ed Week this year, please help us introduce even more young minds to open source software development through Google Code-in. To learn more about Google Code-in— including rules and FAQs—please visit the site and the Getting Started Guide.

Posted by Leon Nicholls, Developer Programs Engineer

Today we launched the Google Cast Remote Display plugin for Unity to make it easy to take your Unity games to TVs. The Google Cast Remote Display APIs use the powerful GPUs, CPUs and sensors of your Android or iOS mobile device to render a local display on your mobile device and a remote display on your TV.

Unity is a very popular cross-platform game development platform that supports mobile devices. By combining the Google Cast Remote Display technology with the amazing rendering engine of Unity, you can now develop high-end gaming experiences that users can play on an inexpensive Chromecast and other Google Cast devices.

Games Using the Plugin

We have exciting gaming apps from our partners that already use the Remote Display plugin for Unity, with many more coming shortly.

Monopoly Here & Now is the latest twist on the classic Monopoly game. Travel the world visiting some of the world’s most iconic cities and landmarks and race to be the first player to fill your passport with stamps to win! It's a fun new way to play for the whole family.

Risk brings the original game of strategic conquest to the big screen. Challenge your friends, build your army, and conquer the world! The game includes the classic world map as well as two additional themed maps.

These games show that you can create games that look beautiful, using the power of a phone or tablet and send that amazing world to the TV.

Add the Remote Display Plugin to Your Game

You can download the Remote Display plugin for Unity from either GitHub or the Unity Asset Store. If you have an existing Unity game, simply import the Remote Display package and add the CastRemoteDisplayManager prefab to your scene. Next, set up cameras for the local and remote displays and configure them with the CastRemoteDisplayManager.

To display a Cast button in the UI so the user can select a Google Cast device, add the CastDefaultUI prefab to your scene.

Now you are ready to build and run the app. Once you connect to a Cast device you will see the remote camera view on the TV.

You have to consider how you will adapt your game interactions to support a multi-screen user experience. You can use the mobile device sensors to create abstract controls which interact with actions on the screen via motion or touch. Or you can create virtual controls where the player touches something on the device to control something else on the screen.

For visual design it is important not to fatigue the player by making them constantly look up and down. The Google Cast UX team has developed the Google Cast Games UX Guidelines to explain how to make the user experience of cast-enabled games consistent and predictable.

Developer Resources

Learn more about Google's official Unity plugins here. To see a more detailed description on how to use the Remote Display plugin for Unity, read our developer documentation and try our codelab. We have also published a sample Unity game on the Unity Asset Store and GitHub that is UX compliant. Join our G+ community to share your Google Cast developer experience.

With over 20 million Chromecast devices sold, the opportunity for developers is huge, and it’s simple to add Remote Display to an existing Unity game. Now you can take your game to the biggest screen in millions of user’s homes.

Originally posted on Inside AdMob

Posted by Sean Meng AdMob Product Marketing

Predictions estimate that by 2017, 94.5% of app downloads will be free [1]. As a developer, you are probably juggling creating great content for your game and finding ways to monetize it. It’s important to develop a robust monetization model that takes into consideration the spending preferences of all users. That’s why today we are unveiling a new white paper with insights and ideas on building effective monetization models: A Winning Combination - How using in-app purchases and ads together can maximize mobile game revenue.

Today, in-app ads and freemium (free download with IAPs*) fuel the growth of mobile app revenue, growing at 71% and 72% respectively from 2013 to 2014 [2]. Through an analysis of over 10,000 top Android apps, we found that for games, using IAP and ads together can potentially generate 117% more revenue than just IAPs alone.

However, a hybrid approach is more than simply bundling ads and IAPs together; it’s about targeting the right users at the right time with the right monetization opportunity. The goal of our white paper is to help you accomplish that easily and effectively.

In this white paper, you will learn the following:

• What an effective hybrid monetization model looks like and the benefits it can deliver;
• The principles and frameworks for building an effective hybrid monetization strategy;
• Best practices from developers around the world.

You can download the white paper here. Find out what AdMob’s IAP solution can do to help you build a strong hybrid monetization model.


We’d love to hear what you think of the white paper. Please share with us on Twitter and Google+ what other tips you have in building a strong hybrid monetization strategy.

Originally posted on Chromium Blog

Posted by Darin Fisher, VP Engineering, Chrome



We believe this is a pivotal moment for the web platform, as early adopters of a set of key enabling technologies and tools are seeing success. During the keynote, we covered the evolution of the mobile platform and the shift towards “progressive web apps,” which are fast, robust, app-like experiences built using modern web capabilities. The web has come a long way, and building immersive apps with web technology on mobile no longer requires giving up properties of the web you’ve come to love. Flipkart’s new mobile web experience is a great example of a progressive web app that uses the new capabilities to provide a next-generation user experience.



In practice, progressive web apps have three main aspects that separate them from traditional websites: reliability, performance, and engagement.

• Responses (tap to response) should be less than 100ms 
• Animations (scrolling, gestures, and transitions) should run at 60 frames per second
• Idle time should be used to opportunistically schedule non-essential work in 50ms chunks
• Loading should be finished in under 1 second

Posted by Alex Ames, Fun Propulsion Labs*

At Fun Propulsion Labs we spend some of our time building sample games to help demonstrate how to make easy-to-build, performant, cross-platform games. With the growth of Google Cardboard, we got to work and over many long evenings, feeding our animal hunger on sushi, we came up with Zooshi. Zooshi is an open source, cross-platform game written in C++ which supports:

• Android, Android TV, Windows, OSX, and Linux
• Google Cardboard
• Google Play Games Services sign-in and leaderboards on Android
• Level customization

Zooshi serves as a demonstration of how to build Android games using a suite of newly released and updated open source game technologies from Google:

• Motive drives our Animation system, giving life and movement to the characters and environment.
• CORGI, the Component Oriented Reusable Game Interface, is an Entity-Component system designed to allow users to define complicated game objects as collections of modular, custom-defined behaviors.
• FlatUI is a straightforward immediate mode GUI system with a light footprint that makes building up user interfaces a breeze.
• Scene Lab allows designers to design levels and edit entities from right in the game without needing to use an external editor.
• Breadboard provides an easy to use node based scripting system for editing entity behaviors that's accessible to designers without deep knowledge of programming.
• FPLBase is a cross-platform API layer, for abstracting low-level tasks like reading input and creation of graphical contexts.

As in our previous release, Pie Noon, we also made extensive use of Flatbuffers, Mathfu, fplutil, and WebP.

You can download the game in the Play Store and the latest open source release from our GitHub page. We invite you to learn from the code to see how you can apply these libraries and utilities in your own Android games. Take advantage of our discussion list if you have any questions, and don’t forget to toss some sushi around while you’re at it!

* Fun Propulsion Labs is a team within Google that's dedicated to advancing gaming on Android and other platforms.

Posted by Paul Kinlan, Chrome Developer Relations

Welcome to day two of the Chrome Dev Summit livestream 2015! Today, we’ll have a full day of sessions covering every aspect of performance on the web. Flipkart will also be joining us on stage later today to talk about their experience building a Progressive web app. Tune in to the livestream below. We look forward to engaging in the conversation with you at #ChromeDevSummit.

Posted by Sarah Clark, Program Manager, Google Developer Training

What do you need to stand out from the crowd of web developers, and ultimately, land that perfect job?

We asked ourselves that same question and decided to help by introducing the Senior Web Developer Nanodegree. Built in collaboration with Udacity, this online program is designed to teach you the tools, frameworks, and techniques needed to write robust code for progressive web applications that are secure and easy to use. Spending about 10 hours a week, most students can earn this Nanodegree credential in 9-12 months at a cost of $200 per month with 50% returned upon completion.

Along the way, you will also learn how to integrate new technologies, such as Service Worker and Web Components, and work extensively with Gulp and other tools. You’ll hear from Google experts, such as Ido Green, Jake Archibald (co-author of the Service Worker spec), Luke Wroblewski (author and strategist), Paul Bakaus (Studio 5 CTO, Zynga) and Alice Boxhall (author of the Chrome accessibility developer tools).

How can you get started? There are two different ways to participate. One option is the paid Nanodegree program, which includes code-level project reviews and feedback, coaching, support from a cohort of peers, building a portfolio of work, and career support services. The second option is entirely free and includes the same instructional courses, quizzes and projects individually, which you can take at your own pace.

For more details, and to be notified when enrollment opens, check out udacity.com/googlewebdev.

Posted by Paul Kinlan, Chrome Developer Relations

Welcome to the Chrome Dev Summit livestream 2015! Today, Darin Fisher, VP of Chrome, has some exciting announcements and will speak about how the Chrome team is thinking about the future of the web. Tune in to the livestream below. We look forward to engaging in the conversation with you at #ChromeDevSummit.

Originally posted on Google Cloud Platform Blog

Posted by Benjamin Wulfe, Firebase

Firebase is a platform for building Android, iOS and web-based mobile apps, offering real-time data storage and automatic synchronization across devices. But what about when you need to run backend processes on the data? By connecting an App Engine application to your Firebase database, you can perform complex logic on the data without having to manage synchronization and updates; Firebase handles that for you. Updates in the Android client release of Firebase 2.4.0 make it easy to access a Firebase database from an App Engine application. The tutorial, Use Firebase and Google App Engine in an Android App, walks you through the steps to create an Android app that stores a to-do list in Firebase, and uses backend logic running on App Engine to send daily reminder emails. In the process of working through the tutorial, you’ll learn how to use the following technologies:

• Firebase — a platform for building mobile apps, offering realtime data storage and synchronization, user authentication, and more.
• Android Studio — an Android development environment based on IntelliJ IDEA.
• Cloud Tools for Android Studio — a set of tools included with Android Studio, that integrate with Google Cloud Platform services.
• Google App Engine — an environment for running application code in the cloud; Platform as a service (PaaS).