We’re excited to announce that Vungle’s industry-leading performance marketing platform is now available on Fire tablets and the Amazon Appstore.

The name of your game is going to be the single most important decision you make. The most basic thing you can do to help your game be more successful is to simply give it a descriptive name.

It’s easy to get bogged down in the details and forget the most valuable part of making a game, which is building something fun to play. Here, I will talk about some approaches to adding artwork and sounds into your game.

If you're developing an app, you can speed up your development by using frameworks. Frameworks allow you to work with existing code libraries, so you don’t have to create these libraries yourself.

You have a game idea and want to start building right away. But making a game is more than just having a good idea and the skill to code it. The first step is to create a game design document (GDD) to solidify your ideas.

Whether you are a seasoned developer, or just getting started, chances are you need a little encouragement to go from a blank canvas, to a fully functional end product.

Last week at GDC there were a bunch of announcements from Unity but one we are very excited to share is a commitment from Unity for better support for publishing to Fire OS. Over the past year Unity has been adding lots of features to their platform as they continue their commitment to quality and innovation. That being said, it’s never been a better time to make Unity games for Fire OS and Amazon Appstore. To help get you started, here are some of the best blog posts we’ve published about using Unity from the past few months:

When creating a build of your game for Amazon Underground, it’s important to make sure that your APK has a unique bundle identifier and an icon with the Underground sash. These two requirements help make your Underground game stand out when installed on a player’s device and also help avoid any installation conflict you may have with the paid version of your game. You can learn more about these requirements from our dev portal here. If you are building a Unity Game, you already know that there isn’t an easy way to create separate Android builds per target. Once you configure the build, it's the same for all Android platforms. To get around this, we are going to talk about a plugin called Advanced Builder which will help you not only automate your different builds but also allows you to write a custom build script to change out icons based on whether it’s an Underground version or a standard one. Let’s get started.

Advanced Builder

Advanced Builder is paid plugin on the Unity Asset store that allows you to set up individual builds based on target platforms and automate a lot of the tedious build steps. Once you have it installed you can create a new release type for the Underground build. Here you can see I have a Standard build and my Underground Build.

Gone are the days where you can make a game and publish it to a single platform and expect to be successful. Like any business that sells consumer products, you need to go where the people are. That means the games you make should run on a multitude of different platforms and accept any number of different input types. There’s also one more catch: your players expect to be able to share their game data across all of these different platforms, especially if they are paying for your game multiple times. With that in mind I have outlined what I call “responsive game design,” which is modeled loosely after some of the core concepts of responsive web design. It’s also a framework that will help you think about enabling your games to scale across multiple platforms.

Join us on February 26^th to learn how to go From Idea to Appstore—Building Successful Cross Platform Games. At the end of this webinar you will know how to:

• Build games that scale correctly across multiple platforms.
• Take a raw idea and turn it into a shippable product.
• Design your game to work across multiple resolutions, different input devices and on different types of hardware.

Reserve Your Spot Today

Want to learn more? Register today to learn how to builc your first cross-platform game:

Register for 7:00am PDT (3:00pm GMT) on Friday, February 26, 2016

Register for 1:00pm PDT (9:00pm GMT) on Friday, February 26, 2016

-Jesse

Building games as an indie or AAA studio is serious business. Join the Amazon Appstore and AWS during our GDC developer day event on March 15^th, 2016 as we teach you everything from game ideation, creation, scaling, monetization, marketing, polishing and publishing. We have an incredible line up of speakers, including Amazon evangelists and industry thought leaders from Twitch, Backflip Studios, Yacht Club Games and King. Come get practical advice and best practices on how to scale the business side of your game development. The developer day is part of the official GDC programming, so if you are attending GDC make sure to come out and check out the full list of talks we’ll be giving. Click here to register.

From a One Person Shop to Indie Dev to AAA: What It Really Takes to Grow

10:00am-11:00am

We've entered a golden age of creativity and experimentation. Today, anyone with an idea can build a game and publish it to a global audience.  How does the gifted amateur become a pro game developer, and from there, a games industry success story? Hint: it requires more than just programming or artistic talent. In this session, we'll show you how to approach game development as a business - even if business isn't your "thing." We'll look at the single most-important skill you can develop, and show by example what happens if you neglect it. We'll also offer practical insights on choosing a game genre, development environment, and target hardware as well as how to monetize your game.