Our first contact with OUYA: porting Beekyr.

Porting the Beekyr (game) to OUYA had to go through some steps. It took us just a few days .

Bureaucracy:
We had to make our account, and register payments information and legal tax documents:

We took a long time: Because we had to download, print, fill, sign, scan, convert to PDF and send some Tax form for the US gobernment.

After that , the technical part started:




Controller:
We had to make the game work with the controllers. It took a while as buttons were not being recognized. Plus we had some code that making the controllers go funny. Then since OUYA has a game pad that is basically a keyboard and mouse it didn't really recognize it as a controller. Well that what I thought. Then turned out that it was really recognized in the first frame of the game but the garbage collector was erasing it straight after, so we had to initialize it all then. It finally worked.
We optimized it so much that XBOX 360 controller also works (works better than the native OUYA controller!).


Performance:


When it worked, I had to make sure the game worked smooth... It wasn't the case. The base code had to be slightly edited to reduce the screensize. We are forced to use 1080p so that is a big area to fill for a mobile GPU. It worked but it was slwowing down at times makign the game not fun.
I had to limit the screen size to a smaller area, to at least keep the game running at constant 30 FPS.

Ideally we will love to make the game run at 60FPS like the PC version. But maybe OUYA is not powerul enough?

OUYA specific details:
The guidelines say that we need to be explicit about things: I.E If a menu requires touch pad we need to tell the users. So we had to add some messages to tell them.

We also had to improve some misleading messages. Like Game has 23 stages but when you finish the game it says 24 stages completed.

Scrollable menus that in Android you only need to drag down with a finger. In OUYA is not so clear and they need to be explicitly told there are more items with a permanent scrollbar for example.

OUYA at the moment doesn't have GooglePlay so we can't really use GoogleGames services ,it's a shame because the Hi-scores system is a very cool thing to have (like we have in the GooglePlay version)
 
Thins like that made the game a little bit more polished thanks to the OUYA testers. At start it seems to be annoying but really it's better as it only improves the game.

Please leave comments in the unofficial OUYA apps forum:
http://ouyaforum.com/showthread.php?7650-Beekyr-Eco-Shoot-em-up-Kaleido-Games&p=84633&highlight=beekyr#post84633

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