Telltale Games share their tips for success on Android TV

Lily Sheringham, Developer Marketing at Google Play


Editor’s note: This is another post in our series featuring tips from developers finding success on Google Play. This week, we’re sharing advice from Telltale Games on how to create a successful game on Android TV. -Ed.


With new Android hardware being released from the likes of Sony, Sharp, and Philips amongst others, Android TV and Google Play can help you bring your game to users right in their living rooms through a big screen experience.

The recent Marshmallow update for Android TV means makes it easier than ever to extend your new or existing games and apps for TV. It's important to understand how your game is presented in the user interface and how it can help users get to the content they want quickly.




Telltale Games is a US-founded game developer and publisher, based in San Francisco, California. They’re well known for the popular series ‘The Walking Dead’ and ‘Game of Thrones‘ which was created in partnership with HBO.



Zac Litton, VP of Technology at Telltale Games, shares his tips for creating and launching your games with Android TV.

Tips for launching successful games on Android TV

1. Determine the Device for Android TV: Determine what device your game is running on by using the UiModeManager.getCurrentModeType() method. If the device is running in television mode, you can declare what to display as the launch point of the game on the Android TV itself (Configuration). Add the LEANBACK_LAUNCHER filter category to one of your intent-filters to identify your game as being enabled for TV. This is required for your game to be considered a TV app in Google Play.



2. Touchscreen vs TV: TVs don’t have touch screens so make sure you set the touchscreen required flag to false in the manifest as touch is implicitly true by default on Android. This will help avoid your game getting filtered from the TV Play store right out of the gate. Also, check your permissions, as some imply hardware requirements which you may need to override explicitly.



3. Use Hardware APIs: Use the package manager which has System Feature API to enable your game to reason about what capabilities it can and should expose. For example, whether to show the user touch screen controls or game controller controls. You can also make your app location aware using the location APIs available in Google Play services to add location awareness with automated location tracking, geofencing, and activity recognition.



4. Use appropriate controllers: To reach the most users, your app should support a simplified input scheme that doesn’t require a directional pad (D-pad controller). The player needs to be able to use a D-Pad in all aspects of the game—not just controlling core gameplay, but also navigating menus and ads, therefore your Android TV game shouldn’t refer to a touch interface specifically. For example, an Android TV game should not tell a player to "Tap here to continue."



5. Appear in the right place: Make sure you add an android:isGame attribute to the application element of the manifest and set it to true in order to enable the installed game to show up on the correct launcher row, games.



6. Provide home screen banners: Provide a home screen banner for each localization supported, especially if you are an international developer. The banner (320 x 180) is the game launch point that appears on the TV home screen on the games row.



7. Use a TV image for your Store Listing: Be sure you provide at least one TV screen shot on your Store Listing page. Then include a high res icon, feature graphic, promo graphic and TV banner.



8. Improve visibility through ‘search’ and ‘recommendations’: Android TV uses the Android search interface to retrieve content data from installed apps and games, and deliver search results to the user. Implement a ContentProvider to show instant suggestions to the user, and a SearchManager to deep link your game’s content.



9. Set appropriate pricing and distribution: Check “Distribute to Android TV” in the relevant section in the Developer Console. This will trigger a review by Google to ensure your game meets the minimum requirements for TV.



10. Guide the user: Use a tutorial to guide the player into the game mechanics and provide an input reference to the user based on the input control they are using.

With the recently released Android TV codelab and online class from Udacity, you can learn how to convert your existing mobile game into Android TV in just four hours. Find out more about how to build games for Android TV and how you to publish them using familiar tools and processes in Google Play.

New permissions requirements for Android TV

Posted by Anirudh Dewani, Developer Advocate


Android 6.0 introduces a new runtime permission model that gives users more granular control over granting permissions requested from their apps and leads to faster app installs. Users can also revoke these permissions from Settings at any point of time. If an app running on the M Preview supports the new permissions model, the user does not have to grant any permissions when they install or upgrade the app. Developers should check for permissions that require runtime grant from users, and request them if the app doesn’t already have them.


To list all permissions that require runtime grant from users on Android 6.0 -

adb shell pm list permissions -g -d 

RECORD_AUDIO

Apps should generally request as few permissions as possible. Voice search is an integral part of Android TV content discovery experience. When using the internal SpeechRecognizer to enable Voice Search, apps must declare RECORD_AUDIO permission in the manifest. RECORD_AUDIO requires explicit user grant during runtime in Android 6.0. When using the Android TV Leanback support library, apps can eliminate the need for requesting RECORD_AUDIO during runtime by using SpeechRecognitionCallback instead of SpeechRecognizer.

SearchActivity.java

Commit from Android TV Leanback Sample repository.

mFragment = (SearchFragment) getFragmentManager()
                .findFragmentById(R.id.search_fragment);

if (!USE_INTERNAL_SPEECH_RECOGNIZER) {
   
    mSpeechRecognitionCallback = new SpeechRecognitionCallback() {
        
        @Override
        public void recognizeSpeech() {
            if (DEBUG) Log.v(TAG, "recognizeSpeech");
        
            // ACTION_RECOGNIZE_SPEECH
            startActivityForResult(mFragment.getRecognizerIntent(), REQUEST_SPEECH);
        }
    };
    mFragment.setSpeechRecognitionCallback(mSpeechRecognitionCallback);
}

When SpeechRecognitionCallback is set, Android Leanback support library will let the your activity process the voice search action instead of using the internal SpeechRecognizer. The app can then use RecognizerIntent to support speech recognition.


If you have an Android TV app targeting API Level 23, please update the app to use SpeechRecognitionCallback and remove RECORD_AUDIO permission from your manifest.

Growing Android TV engagement with search and recommendations

Posted by Maru Ahues, Media Developer Advocate

When it comes to TV, content is king. But to enjoy great content, you first need to find it. We created Android TV with that in mind: a truly smart TV should deliver interesting content to users. Today, EPIX® joins a growing list of apps that use the Android TV platform to make it easy to enjoy movies, TV shows, sports highlights, music videos and more.

Making TV Apps Searchable

Think of your favorite movie. Now try to locate it in one of your streaming apps. If you have a few apps to choose from, it might take some hunting before you can watch that movie. With Android TV, we want to make it easier to be entertained. Finding ‘Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles’ should be as easy as picking up the remote, saying ‘Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles’ and letting the TV find it.

Searching for ‘Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles’ shows results from Google Play and EPIX

You can drive users directly to content within your app by making it searchable from the Android TV search interface. Join app developers like EPIX, Sky News, YouTube, and Hulu Plus who are already making content discovery a breeze.

Recommending TV Content

When users want suggestions for content, the recommendations row on Android TV helps them quickly access relevant content right from the home screen. Recommendations are based on the user’s recent and frequent usage behaviors, as well as content preferences.

Recommendations from installed apps, like EPIX, appear in the Android TV home screen

Android TV allows developers to create recommendations for movies, TV shows, music and other types of content. Your app can provide recommendations to users to help get your content noticed. As an example, EPIX shows hollywood movies. NBA Game Time serves up basketball highlights. Washington Post offers video summaries of world events, and YouTube suggests videos based on your subscriptions and viewing history.

With less than one year since the consumer launch of Android TV, we’re already building upon a simpler, smarter and more personalized TV experience, and we can’t wait to see what you create.

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Haystack TV Doubles Engagement with Android TV

Posted by Joshua Gordon, Developer Advocate

Haystack TV is a small six person startup with an ambitious goal: personalize the news. Traditionally, watching news on TV means viewing a list of stories curated by the network. Wouldn’t it be better if you could watch a personalized news channel, based on interesting YouTube stories?

Haystack already had a mobile app, but entering the living room space seemed daunting. Although “Smart TVs” have been on the market for a while, they remain challenging for developers to work with. Many hardware OEMs have proprietary platforms, but Android TV is different. It’s an open ecosystem with great developer resources. Developers can reach millions of users with familiar Android APIs. If you have an existing Android app, it’s easy to bring it to the living room.

Two weeks was all it took for Haystack TV to bring their mobile app to Android TV. That includes building an immersive, cinematic UI (a task greatly simplified by the Android framework). Since launching on Android TV, Haystack TV’s viewership is growing at 40% per month. Previously, users were spending about 40 minutes watching content on mobile per week. Now that’s up to 80 minutes in the living room. Their longest engagements are through Chromecast and Android TV.

Hear from Daniel Barreto, CEO of Haystack TV, on developing for Android TV

Haystack TV’s success on Android TV is a great example of how the Android multi-form factor developer experience shines. Once you’ve learned the ropes of writing Android apps, developing for another form factor (Wear, Auto, TV) is simple.

Android TV helps you create cinematic UIs

Haystack TV’s UI is smooth and cinematic. How were they able to build a great one so quickly? Developing an immersive UI/UX with Android TV is surprisingly easy. The Leanback support library provides fragments for browsing content, showing a details screen, and search. You can use these to get transitions and animations almost for free. To learn more about building UIs for Android TV, watch the Using the Leanback Library DevByte and check out the code samples.

Browsing recommended stories

Your content, front and center

The recommendations row is a central feature of the Android TV home screen. It’s the first thing users see when they turn on their TVs. You can surface content to appear on the recommendations row by implementing the recommendation service. For example, your app can suggest videos your users will want to watch next (say, the next episode in a series, or a related news story). This is great for getting noticed and increasing engagements.

Haystack’s content on the recommendations row

Make your content searchable

How can users find their favorite movie or show from a library of thousands? On Android TV, they can search for it using their voice. This is much faster and more relaxing than typing on the screen with a remote control! In addition to providing in-app search, your app can surface content to appear on the global search results page. The framework takes care of speech recognition for you and delivers the result to your app as a plain text string.

Next Steps

Android TV makes it possible for small startups to create apps for the living room. There are extensive developer resources. For an overview, watch the Introduction to Android TV DevByte. For details, see the developer training docs. Watch this episode of Coffee with a Googler to learn more about the vision for the platform. To get started on your app, visit developer.android.com/tv.

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