Here is a quick recap of new posts for the week beginning, Monday March 30^th on the Amazon Apps & Services Blog.

Don’t forget you can follow us on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and our YouTube channel.

-Dave (@TheDaveDev)

Here is a quick recap of new posts for the week beginning, Monday March 23^rd on the Amazon Apps & Services Blog.

Don’t forget you can follow us on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and our YouTube channel.

-Dave (@TheDaveDev)

Amazon Echo is designed around your voice. It's always on—just ask for information, music, news, weather, and more. Echo begins working as soon as it detects the wake word. You can pick Alexa or Amazon as your wake word. Echo is also an expertly tuned speaker that can fill any room with immersive sound. Tucked under Echo's light ring is an array of seven microphones.

These sensors use beam-forming technology to hear you from any direction. With enhanced noise cancellation, Echo can hear you ask a question even while it's playing music. Echo uses on-device keyword spotting to detect the wake word. When Echo detects the wake word, it lights up and streams audio to the cloud, where we leverage the power of Amazon Web Services to recognize and respond to your request. Echo's brain is in the cloud, running on Amazon Web Services so it continually learns and adds more functionality over time. The more you use Echo, the more it adapts to your speech patterns, vocabulary, and personal preferences.

The Amazon Echo team is working on a public SDK to enable developers, content creators, and service providers to build apps and experiences for Amazon Echo. Starting now, we are accepting signups for a limited-participation beta ahead of the SDK's public release.  If you would like to participate you can sign up here.  Stay tuned to this blog for details on the public SDK release.

-Dave (@TheDaveDev)

Here is a quick recap of new posts for the week beginning, Monday March 16^th on the Amazon Apps & Services Blog.

Don’t forget you can follow us on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and our YouTube channel.

-Dave (@TheDaveDev)

Here is a quick recap of new posts for the week beginning, Monday March 9^th on the Amazon Apps & Services Blog.

Don’t forget you can follow us on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and our YouTube channel.

-Dave (@TheDaveDev)

Here is a quick recap of new posts for the week beginning, Monday March 2^nd on the Amazon Apps & Services Blog.

Don’t forget you can follow us on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and our YouTube channel.

-Dave (@TheDaveDev)

Here is a quick recap of new posts for the week beginning, Monday February 23^rd on the Amazon Apps & Services Blog.

Don’t forget you can follow us on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and our YouTube channel.

-Dave (@TheDaveDev)

Here is a quick recap of new posts for the week ending February 20^th on the Amazon Apps & Services Blog.

Don’t forget you can follow us on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and our YouTube channel.

-Dave (@TheDaveDev)

Amazon will be out at GDC San Francisco next month offering several opportunities to connect directly with you. Starting on Monday, March 2^nd from 5:05pm to 5:30pm you can hear @MikeFHines talk about What Makes the Top 50 IAP Games Unique on the Amazon Appstore and lessons you can apply when generating revenue in your own games.

Then on Tuesday, March 3^rd from 10am to 5:30pm we will be hosting an Amazon Developer Day covering games for Amazon Fire devices, how to build better cloud gaming experiences, reaching fans with Twitch, and applying in-app monetization best practices based on Amazon's IAP data. Technical evangelists from Amazon Appstore and AWS will be on hand to answer your questions as well as the Games Business Development team to discuss game promotion opportunities. We’ll also have devices for you to explore and test your games on, as well as a chance to win some Amazon Fire devices! Here is what the day’s agenda will look like. Click here to add a session to your GDC Scheduler.

An Overview of the Amazon Devices and Services for Game Developers
10am-10:45am
David Isbitski, Developer Evangelist, Amazon
Alf Tan, Head of Games Business Development, Amazon
Vlad Suglobov, CEO, G5 Entertainment
We will start the day off with an overview of Amazon's current developer ecosystem.  Learn how you can take advantage of AWS services specifically targeted for Game Developers, Amazon's Appstore and the new line of consumer Fire devices like Amazon Fire TV, Fire TV Stick and Fire tablets, as well as monetization services such as in-app purchasing.  Plus, hear how G5 entertainment has had success on the Amazon platform from G5 CEO Vlad Suglobov.          

Top Tips for Porting Unity Games to Fire Devices
10:45am-11:30am
Jesse Freeman, Developer Evangelist, Amazon  
In this talk, we'll cover important tips for porting Unity games over to Fire TV, Fire tablets and Fire phone. Through code examples, we'll demo how to support multiple resolutions for pixel perfect Orthographic and Perspective Cameras, abstracting player input to support keyboard, controller and touch, and optimization tips for C# for the best performance. We'll also show how to deploy to our devices and get your game up and running on Fire OS. You'll walk away knowing what it takes to publish to the Amazon Appstore and help expand your game's user base.

How to Evolve Players into Fans
11:30am-12:00pm
Peter Heinrich, Developer Evangelist, Amazon
We’ve analyzed the top mobile games to see what best practices make them stand out from the crowd. Several trends emerging now will amplify those best practices, and games will have more opportunity than ever to excel. In the future, the top games will have fully realized fan bases that will drive their user acquisition and engagement engines. That fan base will include players but also content creators, advocates and potential new customers —  this will open up a wider range of monetization options.  Come see how top mobile games drive more engagement and revenue and learn how to you can do this with your own game.

Catered Lunch
12:00-12:30pm

Build and Deploy Your Mobile Game with AWS
12:30pm-1:30pm
Dhruv Thukral, Gaming Solutions Architect, Amazon
Tara Walker, Technical Evangelist, Amazon
Developing a successful mobile game today is about more than just the game:  Users expect backend services like user authentication, downloadable content, and social features. Using our AWS Mobile SDK for iOS and Android, it’s easier than ever to build a game with these services.  This session will provide a step-by-step approach to add features to your game such as user identity management, dynamic content updates, cross-platform data sync, and more.  We’ll demonstrate how to use the AWS Mobile SDK to securely interact with services such as Cognito, DynamoDB, S3, and EC2.  Finally, we’ll provide a few common architecture patterns and scalability tips for AWS game backends.

How We Made a Game No Fun
1:30pm-2:15pm
Mike Hines, Developer Evangelist, Amazon
There are lots of suggestions about how to make a game fun.  Best practices are everywhere, but you can't just follow them blindly.  To create a fun game, you have to figure out how best practices integrate into your specific game.  Come see what we did wrong, and what we learned along the way.       

Connecting with Your Customers - Building Successful Mobile Games through the Power of AWS Analytics
2:30pm-3:30pm
Nate Wiger, Principal Gaming Solutions Architect, Amazon
Free to play is now the standard for mobile and social games.  But succeeding in free-to-play is not easy:  You need in-depth data analytics to gain insight into your players so you can monetize your game.  Learn how to leverage new features of AWS services such as Elastic MapReduce, Amazon S3, Kinesis, and Redshift to build an end-to-end analytics pipeline.  Plus, we’ll show you how to easily integrate analytics with other AWS services in your game.

Deploying a Low-Latency Multiplayer Game Globally: Loadout
3:30pm-4:15pm
Nate Wiger, Principal Gaming Solutions Architect, Amazon
This is a deep-dive straight into the guts of running a low-latency multiplayer game, such as a first-person shooter, on a global scale. We dive into architectures that enable you to split apart your back-end APIs from your game servers, and Auto Scale them independently.  See how to run game servers in multiple AWS regions such as China and Frankfurt, and integrate them with your central game stack.  We’ll even demo this in action, using AWS CloudFormation and Chef to deploy Unreal Engine game servers.

How Game Developers Reach New Customers with Twitch
4:15pm-5:15pm
Marcus Graham, Director of Community & Education at Twitch
Ernest Le, Director Publisher & Developer Partnerships at Twitch
Twitch is the largest live video platform and community for gamers with more than 100 million visitors per month. We want to connect gamers around the world by allowing them to broadcast, watch, and chat from everywhere they play.  In this session, learn game developers are creating engaging experiences and reaching new customers via the Twitch platform.

Mobile Ads Team at GDC

The Mobile Ads Team will be at GDC and has created a special offer just for attendees!

While attending GDC anyone who integrates the Amazon Mobile Ads API for the first time into their app or game will receive a $100 Amazon.com Gift Card.* The Amazon Mobile Ads API is easy to integrate and delivers highly-relevant mobile optimized ads from Amazon and brand advertisers ensuring a great experience for users. Members of the Mobile Ads team will also be on hand in booth #2429 to help you throughout the event.

Amazon Fire TV Twitch Broadcast

Then on Wednesday, March 4^th we will be broadcasting live from GDC with a couple of special guests from 4pm to 7pm. The event is open to the public from 4pm to 6pm and you do not need to be a GDC pass holder to attend. Simply stop by the AWS Pop-up Loft on Market Street between 4pm to 6pm PST and join us in person for the Twitch stream.

We will be showcasing several new Amazon Fire TV games as well as interviewing the game developers who created them. Not at GDC? No worries, you will be able to watch the stream live on Twitch here from 4pm to 7pm PST.

If you’re a gamedev at GDC this will be a great opportunity for you to speak directly with Amazon Appstore, AWS and Twitch experts all in one place. Hope to see you there!

-Dave (@TheDaveDev)

*Visit exhibit #2429 for more details. Send us an email at amazon-mobile-ads@amazon.com with your Amazon Developer Portal registered email ID to qualify. Existing apps already sending ad requests do not qualify. Existing developers who integrate the Amazon Mobile Ads API into another qualified app for the first time are eligible for the offer. One Amazon.com Gift Card per participant while supplies last. Amazon.com Gift Cards ("GCs") may only be redeemed towards the purchase of eligible products on www.amazon.com GCs cannot be reloaded, resold, transferred for value, redeemed for cash or applied to any other account.  Amazon.co.uk is not responsible if a GC is lost, stolen, destroyed or used without permission.  See www.amazon.com/gc-legal for complete terms and conditions. GCs are issued by ACI Gift Cards, Inc. All Amazon ®, ™ & © are IP of Amazon.com, Inc. or its affiliates. Amazon may modify or cancel this offer at any time.

Here is a quick recap of new posts for the week ending February 13^th on the Amazon Apps & Services Blog.

Don’t forget you can follow us on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and our YouTube channel.

-Dave (@TheDaveDev)

Here is a quick recap of new posts for the week ending February 6^th on the Amazon Apps & Services Blog.

Don’t forget you can follow us on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and our YouTube channel.

-Dave (@TheDaveDev)

Here is a quick recap of new posts for the week ending January 30^th on the Amazon Apps & Services Blog.

Don’t forget you can follow us on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and our YouTube channel.

-Dave (@TheDaveDev)

Today’s mobile developer must engage customers with app experiences that run across an array of devices and platforms yet remain responsive and powerful.  The AWS Mobile SDK can help bring the power of the cloud to your apps while enabling you to build high quality mobile apps quickly and easily across multiple platforms including iOS, Android and Fire OS. 

AWS recently launched an update to the AWS Mobile SDK for Unity developers. The developer preview of AWS Mobile SDK for Unity helps your games handle cloud storage along with identity and user state management directly from within the Unity developer environment. The AWS Unity SDK contains a set of .NET classes that enables games written with Unity to utilize AWS services. Supported AWS services currently include: Amazon Cognito, Amazon S3, and Amazon DynamoDB. The AWS Unity SDK also contains sample code that illustrate how to call AWS services from a Unity Game. The AWS Mobile SDK for Unity is compatible with Unity 4.0 and onward, and supports both Free and Pro versions.

My colleague, Mudeem Siddiqui, elaborates more on some of the key benefits here:

Safeguard AWS credentials: When you use Amazon Cognito, your game is provided with temporary, limited-privilege credentials that it can use to access AWS resources. This means your game can access the resources it needs and that you can follow security best practices by not hard-coding credentials.

Store and sync across devices: Amazon Cognito allows you to store user data for your games, such as user preferences and game state, in the Amazon Cognito sync store. You can then sync this data across a user’s devices to help make their experience consistent across their devices. Amazon Cognito can automatically send a silent push notification to a user’s devices when data in the sync store changes so you can synchronize the latest data right away.

Store game assets in the cloud: With Amazon S3, you can store your game’s assets such as images and videos in the cloud and download them at run time. This reduces the size of your game’s binary, thereby avoiding the AppStore Over the Air download limit.

Store game data in a NoSQL database: You can store your game data that is shared across users in Amazon DynamoDB, a NoSQL database that offers high throughput, and low-latency at any scale.  

For more information on the AWS Mobile SDK for Unity check out the following links:

• Download the AWS Mobile SDK for Unity 
• Getting Started Guide
• Get Started with Amazon Cognito Sync
• Get Started with Amazon S3
• Get Started with Aamazon DynamoDB
• AWS Mobile SDK for Unity GitHub Repo
• AWS Mobile SDKs for Unity Samples GitHub Repo

If you haven't registered for an Amazon Appstore account yet, you can create a free developer account here and immediately get started testing your app on Fire devices. For more information about getting started with Amazon Fire devices and the Amazon Appstore, check out the following free resources:

• Amazon Mobile Apps and Services Developer Portal
• Amazon Mobile App SDK
• Amazon Fire TV and Fire TV Stick SDK
• Amazon Fire Phone SDK
• Introduction to Unity Part 1: Unity’s IDE
• Introduction to Unity Part 2: Learning C#
• Setting Up In-App Purchasing in Unity

-Dave (@TheDaveDev)

Here is a quick recap of new posts for the week ending January 23^rd on the Amazon Apps & Services Blog.
 

Don’t forget you can follow us on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and our YouTube channel.

-Dave (@TheDaveDev)

Here is a quick recap of new posts for the week ending January 16^th on the Amazon Apps & Services Blog.

Don’t forget you can follow us on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and our YouTube channel.

-Dave (@TheDaveDev)