Amazon GameCircle and the other game services we offer are designed to make mobile game development easier, but knowing where to start may still be difficult. To offer a bit of guidance, I thought it might be worthwhile to take a small, simple game and walk through the process of extending its functionality, one service at a time. Together we’ll gradually add features over the course of several posts, each one focusing on a specific way Amazon services speed development or reduce code complexity. At the end of the series, we’ll have a working game application that shows these services in action and demonstrates how you might incorporate them into other projects.

As the title implies, this post will kick off the series with a look at GameCircle, which supports leaderboards, achievements, and Whispersync for Games, a powerful mechanism to synchronize local and cloud data. Games have been saving progress and celebrating player success since the beginning, so GameCircle seems like a good place to begin our journey.

Prerequisites

Note that this blog series assumes that you are comfortable developing for Android using Java and Eclipse, and that your development environment is set up and working properly with the Android Developer Tools (ADT). Some Amazon services are available only on Kindle Fire, so that will be our target device throughout the series. You must install the Kindle Fire SDK add-ons in order to use those features. For more information, see the Get Started section of Kindle Fire Development Resources.

Importing the Monster Tag Project

Before we begin, we need a simple game that will serve as the base for our experimentation and improvements. Monster Tag displays a horde of monsters and asks the player to tag them as they bounce around the screen. Every time a monster is tagged, it gets startled and speeds off in another direction. The faster a monster is moving when it’s tagged, the more points are awarded to the player.

To import the Monster Tag project into Eclipse, download and extract the source bundle to a convenient location, then choose File | New | Project… from Eclipse’s main menu. Expand Android and select Android Project from Existing Code, then click Next. 

Click Browse… to navigate to the temporary location where you extracted the source code, then click OK. Check Copy projects into workspace and click Finish. 

Once the project has been loaded successfully, you will see it in the Package Explorer:

Launch the application in the debugger for the first time by selecting the MainActivity and choosing Run | Debug As | Android Application from Eclipse’s main menu. You should see a lot of little orange guys flying around, daring to be tagged.

Establishing Trust

We have a basic game application running, but we’re still not ready to integrate GameCircle and use it to track high scores online. The GameCircle service won’t accept connections from just any mobile application—it authenticates requests to ensure they’re coming from trusted apps. Every app or game that wants to access GameCircle (and some other Amazon services) must have an “API key,” which is associated with a security profile for that app. The key tells GameCircle that our app is trustworthy.

To establish a security profile and obtain an API key, we must first let Amazon know about our game, which we do on the Mobile Application Distribution Portal. Sign in or create a developer account there if you don’t already have one. (If you’re creating an account for the first time, you’ll be asked to supply some basic information and agree to some terms and conditions. If you intend to create paid apps, you’ll have to provide some extra info, as well.)

Once you’ve logged in, go to the Apps & Services tab and hover over the Add a New App drop-down, then select Add new Android App. Now we can tell Amazon the details of our game:

Generating a Security Profile

After clicking Save we could add more details, such as pricing, icons, and screenshots, but for now we’ll skip those steps and jump right to creation of a security profile. Follow the Security Profile link that appears under the app title on the next screen, then click the Create a New Security Profile button.

You’ll be asked to name the security profile. Note that you can share security profiles between applications, which we’ll discuss in a later post. For now, we’ll assume only Monster Tag will use this one, so we’ll name it accordingly:

Creating an API Key

Now we have a security profile, but no API key has been associated with it yet. Follow the API Keys link that appears after the profile name, then fill in the required fields and click Generate.

NOTE: What you enter in the signature field, below, will depend on your own development environment; you must supply the MD5 signature of your own debug keystore. You can find information about obtaining this value in the Debug application signature section of Getting Your OAuth Credentials and API Key. Typically this involves using keytool (installed as part of the JDK) from the command line:

keytool -list -v -alias androiddebugkey -keystore /path/to/debug.keystore

You should be asked to supply a password, which is “android” by default (no quotes). Check the output for the MD5 signature, highlighted below:

...

Certificate fingerprints:

         MD5:  D4:81:0C:AA:3D:45:DE:45:59:F2:BE:DE:95:A8:E1:65
         SHA1: A1:DF:DD:0D:89:77:81:24:E0:AF:47:AA:B6:55:B6:14:58:7D:4C:E4
         SHA256: 5:50:7F:6F:43:2C:3E:CD:D6:46:F1:F7:96:F2:ED:DE:E8:DD:3A:53:00
         Signature algorithm name: SHA1withRSA
         Version: 3

Adding an API Key to an Eclipse Project

Generating the API key will result in a long base64-encoded string. This is the magic value we need to include in our project to identify our app as trustworthy.

To add it to the project, create a new file called /assets/api_key.txt and paste in the value. Note that api_key.txt must be located in the /assets subfolder.

Enabling GameCircle Data for a Security Profile

Next, we must indicate that there will be GameCircle data associated with the security profile we just created, and that our Monster Tag game will use it. Go to the GameCircle configuration page, select the security profile we created and click Confirm.

Connect a Security Profile to the App

To connect our game to the correct GameCircle data, go to the My Apps tab of your profile, click the Monster Tag app, then follow the Security Profile link. Click the Monster Tag radio button and confirm the action by selecting Apply Profile on the dialog that appears.

Next Steps

Success! Our app is registered with Amazon, there’s a security profile associated with it, and we generated a corresponding API key and added it to our project. We’re ready to use GameCircle and it’s ready to accept requests from our mobile application.

In the next installment of this series, we’ll use GameCircle’s built-in leaderboard functionality to track high scores and let users compete with each other. Now that we have the app and security bookkeeping out of the way, it will be a cakewalk.