The BlackBerry presence at GDC wasn’t just to showcase the powerful platform and tools we provide for game developers, it was also to show those developers and designers how they can be successful on BlackBerry 10.

Our booth was a reflection of our message to the game development communities. We played host to evangelists, consultants, platform developers, technical leads, marketing guys, documentation writers, and game developers. We demonstrated that we are here to support developers and entrepreneurs – this is how we relate to developers all around the world and how we want to connect with game developers as well!

At GDC we shared the news of our partnership with Unity- expanding the possibilities that developers have to create and bring titles to BlackBerry 10. We also had special guests join us on stage to share stories on how successful they were with their titles on BlackBerry 10.

We showcased some of the great game titles already available on BlackBerry 10 and gamers took advantage of the opportunity to play on the BlackBerry Z10. The busiest part of the booth was where we showed off gaming on the BlackBerry Z10 with Shadowgun using our Gamepad API and the HDMI output of the BlackBerry Z10 as a true console replacement.

People who came into our booth were mostly looking for opportunities. People that left the booth were thrilled about BlackBerry 10 and the opportunities our platform provides.

Social networking has dramatically changed the way mobile games are being designed, played and discovered. Less than ten years ago, the shift from asynchronous messaging and stable home pages to instant status updates and socially engaging interactive experiences on social networks pushed the rise of the web 2.0. The same change is currently ongoing in games. For game developers, this means new possibilities to gain better retail presence to drive downloads and revenue.

Whether it be fighting alongside your friends in Clash of Clans or sharing tips how to reach three stars on all levels of Angry Birds, gaming is more social than even. Mobile has brought games to the fingertips of everyone. The gamer is no longer just you and me; it can be your mom, a business traveler waiting for the next flight, grandma, or the little kid next door. Along the expansion of gaming audiences, game developers are facing the problem of all the time rising user acquisition costs and very limited retail presence for their games.

It doesn’t help at all that mobile application stores are full of high-quality games but only a fragment of those get featured. Instead of trying to beg and bribe the platform owners, or putting your money to banner ads, mobile video, cross promotion, community marketing, in-game advertising, free-app-a-day campaigns and similar, you might want to think of ways to leverage the crowd.

Emotions drive discoverability

Casual gamers do not queue outside game stores overnight to get the latest Call of Duty or read articles from gamer magazines. Casual gamers are the same rankers and raters that populate Pinterest, Youtube or Facebook. They stumble upon new games by learning from friends. They play only for seconds at a time and often do not even remember the title of the game, not to mention the developer.

According to this Nielsen study, Xbox gamers spend 84 hours on gaming per month. Mobile gamers spend only a little over 7 hours a month. It is much more difficult to get a mobile gamer to become engaged with a brand. That’s where emotions come in. Gaming is about emotions, and emotions are fuel for sharing. People share funny cat videos, engaging game play footage, victory moments and ridiculous jokes. These same basic motivational factors apply to games – when reaching a high score or passing a game on Veteran level, we want to share our achievements with the world. Emotions are instant. This means new marketing opportunities for game developers without paying big buck for it.

Games app drives discoverability for social games

Social games get additional visibility through the Games application on BlackBerry 10. This top 50 grossing games list is heavily populated by socially enabled games like 10 Pin Shuffle, World of Goo or Wacky Rapids. What’s even more interesting is that currently, nearly all socially enabled games are on the top grossing games list. That’s because every time a user reaches high score, achievement or completes a challenge, it will be posted to the timeline of the Games application and to the Popular games list for other gamers to see. Remember long tail?

Social has been the game-changer that the gaming industry was looking for. People who never played anything get hooked with fast-paced driving of Beach Buggy Blitz or flashy Fruit Blitz and start inviting their real-life friends, who then start playing too.

So, how do you leverage the crowd? The Games application on BlackBerry 10 is the social store window for all social games. All a developer needs to do is to integrate the social features provided by BlackBerry (Scoreloop SDK). That’s it. Check out the getting started guide for how to build Scoreloop into your BlackBerry 10 game.

For a closer look at what Marmalade is capable of make sure you check out this demo of Nick using Marmalade Quick to build a 2D application really fast with Lua and Cocos2d.

Have you used Marmalade to create apps for BlackBerry 10? We’d love to hear about how your experience has been so far!

Device Models

BlackBerry 10 device models will have two different radio variants: 4G HSPA+ and 4G LTE.

Chipset Specifications

Game developers are often required to take hardware-specific features into consideration, such as CPU and GPU speeds, supported texture compression formats and display resolution. To make your life a bit easier, we are providing the following chart, showing all of the display and chipset configurations for the new BlackBerry 10 and existing BlackBerry PlayBook tablet models:

OpenGL ES support

All chipsets for BlackBerry 10 will continue to support OpenGL ES 1.1/2.0 with several common extensions. There are also several vendor-specific extensions available, although aside from texture compression extensions, these are typically not required for developing a high quality game.

The most important thing to call out for game developers is that there are two different GPUs available across all the BlackBerry 10 and BlackBerry PlayBook models. All though the selected GPUs are on par with one another, game developers need to understand that they can create two separate BAR files on models that have different GPUs. Here is the major consideration for this:

Texture Compression

Texture compression is becoming more commonly used in mobile games since texture data often takes up a large bulk of your game assets. Not only does texture compression drastically reduce the memory footprint of your game, it can also result in significant performance gains, especially during level loading. Depending on your game title, the loss in texture quality introduced by compression may or may not be tolerable. However, for very large mobile games that will reach sizes close to or above 1GB, texture compression becomes more of a necessity.

Thankfully, using texture compression is quite easy! The steps required are usually as follows:

1. Compress images offline using texture compression tools or game engines that typically includes them for all the major GPUs on the market.
2. Create a different build configuration for each target chipset that requires a different texture compression format and add the correct compressed textures to each configuration.
3. Write texture loading code to read the texture data into an OpenGL texture, passing the correct compressed texture format parameter.

For a good reference of how to apply dynamic loading of textures supporting various vendor formats, check out the GamePlay 3D framework at www.gameplay3d.org. The Texture class, found directly in the repository at https://github.com/blackberry/GamePlay/blob/master/gameplay/src/Texture.cpp contains code for loading such textures. The sample gameplay-samples/sample06-racer, also found in the repository, demonstrates how to setup your IDE project to have 2 different BlackBerry packaging outputs for different sets of compressed files.

Texture Compression Format and Packaging (1 or 2 BAR files)

Now that you are planning to consider texture compression, you need to decide which images you want to compress and what quality and format to use. You may want to avoid compressing certain textures that require higher quality, such as those used in user interfaces, fonts and main characters. For those that you do plan to compress, there are a couple common options to choose from:

Scenario #1: Lower Quality Compression with One Generic .BAR File

If you are able to use 16-bit compressed textures with no alpha and uncompressed textures for all other images, you can use the ETC1 texture compression format. This format is supported on all BlackBerry 10 and PlayBook models, meaning you need only make a single .BAR file to distribute.

Scenario #2: Higher Quality Compression with Two Vendor Specific .BAR Files

If you require higher quality compression or alpha in your compressed textures, then you must choose to use a vendor specific compression format. This means that you will need at least two different .BAR files to distribute to support all the BlackBerry 10 and PlayBook models.

Vendor GPU SDK’s and Texture Tools

Imagination PowerVR SDK with Texture Tool:

http://www.imgtec.com/powervr/insider/sdkdownloads/index.asp

Qualcomm Adreno SDK with Texture Tool:

https://developer.qualcomm.com/download/adreno-sdk.zip

BlackBerry World + .BAR File Distribution

The developer portal for BlackBerry World will allow developers the ability to upload either a single .BAR file for each model. However, on models like the BlackBerry 10 All Touch and PlayBook shown below that have 2 GPU (Imagination GPU and Qualcomm GPU), developers may choose to upload 2 separated BAR files with different compressed textures in each. When the user downloads the game from BlackBerry World they get the appropriate BAR file for the device chipset. See BlackBerry World here:

Crank up the Graphic Effects and Rendering Techniques – Now in HD…

BlackBerry 10 devices push it to the limits with top GPUs models supporting leading edge graphics effects and rendering techniques used in today’s mobile games. Expect to see performance increases in a magnitude of 2x-4x in both Dual Core CPUs and GPU performance making them ready for all the next wave of kick butt gaming on the platform. New BlackBerry 10 owners will love the new gaming experiences they will get on these devices with emphasis on HD gaming and great gaming hardware to support it.

We’re very excited to announce that BlackBerry and Unity are working together to create a Unity deployment add-on product for BlackBerry 10 smartphones, empowering Unity’s over 1.5 million strong developer community to publish their games on these powerful platforms.

The deployment tools will also be available for BlackBerry PlayBook tablets for the upcoming BlackBerry 10 OS update.

BlackBerry 10 will now be one of the premiere mobile platforms supported by the market-leading Unity Engine. The deployment tool is currently in development by Unity Technologies and BlackBerry, and will be released as an add-on option for Unity.

A beta version of the Unity add-on along will be made available to a limited number of qualified developers in the spring. Unity is expecting the final release to be available in the summer of 2013.

Additionally, Unity and BlackBerry will hold developer meet up events in Europe and North America and will give qualified developer attendees Unity Pro and BlackBerry 10 smartphones. Details are coming soon, so stay tuned to BlackBerry Developers Blog.

This weekend during the BlackBerry Community & Android Port-A-Thons we witnessed something very special happen, something which can energize all our developer community!

We had over 1,000 people around the globe come together for 37.5 hours and submit over 15,000 apps for BlackBerry 10. After five hours we had over 4,000 apps submitted and after nine hours we had over 6,300 apps submitted. One of the developers put this into perspective when he tweeted

@lougazzola Impressive. I remember it taking over a year for AppWorld to get its first 6,300 apps…

— Eric Harty (@Ebscer) January 12, 2013

The Twitterverse was a buzz with over 1,200 #BB10Portathon mentions. 15,060 apps submitted shows that it’s easy to build a BlackBerry 10 app.

We’ve witnessed a huge transition of developers who now believe in the potential for success on the platform and take the time to create an incredible number of apps. The RIM team creating our developer SDKs and tools have made it easy for developers to bring their apps to BlackBerry 10 – in the language you like writing in. Here’s what our community is saying:

@lougazzola @leinir @4shelbysdevs I agree with this. I can even port my android app/webworks/phonegap in under 1 minute really.

— NemOry Oliver (@NemOry) January 14, 2013

@nemory @lougazzola @leinir @4shelbysdevs agreed.. I ported my Adobe Air app in around a minute packaged and signed.

— Stephen (@NZCoderGuy) January 14, 2013

Erik Oros (Application Development Consultant) fielded questions in his area of expertise (HTML5) and I (Lou Gazzola, Senior Marketing Manager) hosted the event. Both of us were on for the complete 37.5 hours. RIM had over 20 experts from around the world that helped developers and I am blown away by the community support with “Oliver”, “K Cheung” and “Michael K” spending most of the time porting apps AND helping the community.

We also had our partners available with representatives from Marmalade, AppendTo (jQuery), PhoneGap, and Appcelerator participating. After witnessing what was happening many of our partners stayed well beyond their scheduled hours.

What an incredible effort from the entire community!  I want to extend a very heart felt Thank You to everyone that participated!!

I know there are many choices when developing a game for the BlackBerry platform, but I wanted to share my favorite with you. If you have not heard of it before, NME is a free and open-source framework, designed to bring a unified feature set and native performance to many platforms, including the BlackBerry® PlayBook™ tablet and BlackBerry® 10.

Defining a Project File

The first place to start when building an NME project is to make sure you have a project file. This will tell NME where your asset and source files are located, as well as meta-data like the application name, version and author.

Unlike other BlackBerry applications, you will not need to define a “bar-descriptor.xml” file later. NME will generate the file for you, based on the values in the NME project file.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<project>
<meta title="Asterisk Game" package="com.testing.asteriskgame" version="1.0.0" company="Joshua Granick" />
<app main="AsteriskGame" path="Export" />
	<window width="800" height="600" unless="mobile" />
<source path="Source" />
<haxelib name="nme" />
<haxelib name="actuate" />
	<assets path="Assets" rename="assets" exclude="icon-*.png" />
<icon path="Assets/icon-114.png" size="114" />
<icon path="Assets/icon-86.png" size="86" />
</project>

You can find more details about the NMML format here.

Loading Assets

NME has an Assets class that makes it simple to load resource files. It accepts a path, based on the file structure of your project and the <assets /> nodes you include in the project file. You can use the Assets class to load bitmap data, bytes, font references, sounds and plain text synchronously.

If you need to load an asset asynchronously, such as from a remote server, you can use the NME Loader and URLLoader classes, which are outside the scope of this post.

Creating a Bitmap

var bitmapData = Assets.getBitmapData (“assets/asterisk.png”);
var bitmap = new Bitmap (bitmapData);
addChild (bitmap);

Unless you are creating a new bitmap in memory, the first step is to load an existing image asset from a file or a web server. In this sample, I am using an existing graphic called “asterisk.png”, which I have included in my project.

Once this process is complete, I will have the data for my bitmap, represented in NME by the BitmapData class. With a BitmapData object, I can use one of multiple rendering methods available. The simplest and most common is to create a Bitmap and add it to the “display list.” In NME, there is a tree of objects which are rendered automatically. By adding a display object to a parent that already is a member of the “display list,” it will be rendered as well. In this way, we can decide when our Bitmap is able to be rendered.

Adding Touch Interaction

It is exciting to get a bitmap on-screen, but in order to build a game we need to be able to handle touch interaction. Although a Bitmap has values like a position, size, scale and alpha (transparency), the Bitmap class cannot handle touch or mouse interaction.

The easiest way to add this support is to put our bitmap inside of a Sprite:

var sprite = new Sprite ();
var bitmap = new Bitmap (Assets.getBitmapData (“assets/asterisk.png”));
sprite.addChild (bitmap);
addChild (sprite);

The Sprite class is one of the most common classes in NME development. In addition to being a DisplayObject, like the Bitmap class, a Sprite instance can contain other objects. The Sprite class also supports dispatches touch and mouse events, which is what we are looking for.

sprite.addEventListener (MouseEvent.MOUSE_DOWN, function (event) { bitmap.visible = false; });

Adding an event listener makes it possible to respond when an event occurs on the objects, such as the MouseEvent.MOUSE_DOWN event.

NME supports a touch-specific API, but most applications will only need to listen to standard mouse events. These will work with touch screens as well as traditional desktop and laptop systems, making it simpler for your project to run on multiple form-factors.

Playing Sound

var sound = Assets.getSound ("assets/fuzz.wav");
sound.play ();

Loading a Sound is simple, thanks to the NME Assets class. Then you can call play to your sound.

Internally, NME is using SDL_mixer on BlackBerry to play audio. This provides excellent support for many file formats, but also presents some restrictions. SDL_mixer supports one streaming “music” channel at once and multiple event “sound” channels simultaneously. NME will try to automatically detect whether a file is “music” or “sound” based on the file extension, but this can be controlled manually in your NMML project file.

SDL_mixer only supports MP3 in the “music” channel, while other formats, such as OGG and WAV, can be used for “sound”. This is a limitation to be aware of, especially if you are using MP3 files.

Download the Sample

You can download the “Asterisk Game,” a small sample that uses these features to make a simple “whack-a-mole” style game. Asterisks will appear on screen, and the player taps the asterisks to make them disappear until time runs out. The score is based on the number of asterisks the player is able to tap before they fade on their own, and bonus points are awarded based on the size of the asterisk – smaller asterisks are worth more points.

If you appreciated this tutorial and would like to learn more about NME, please sound off in the comments!

I was absolutely moved at the end of the 36 hour event when things went quiet and I saw the constant stream of “#BB10Believe” and “I Believe” in the chat window.  I just spent 36 hours with an incredible group of people from around the globe.  Together we chatted, coded, solved problems and created game apps for BlackBerry® 10.  We also had a few laughs!

The number of people that submitted more than five and 10 apps was staggering!  As per the Program Terms and Conditions, the first ten qualified participants to submit 10 approved apps will receive a trip to the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco and the first one hundred qualified participants to submit between five and 10 apps will receive a BlackBerry 10 Dev Alpha testing device.  I was so astounded by the positive response and the number of apps we received, that I went back my team and suggested we do something for the rest of the developers that submitted the required number of apps but were not one of the first 100 or 10 qualifiers for a reward in their category.

As a result, we decided to give away ten additional trips and twenty additional BlackBerry Dev Alpha test devices!  On Dec 16, we will conduct a draw to give away ten more trips to the Game Developers Conference and twenty BlackBerry Dev Alpha testing devices.  The draw for the trips will be open to all those developers who submitted 10 or more approved apps during the BlackBerry Got Game Port-A-Thon Program Period and who have not already qualified for the trip.  The draw for the BlackBerry 10 Dev Alpha testing devices will be open to all those developers who submitted five or more but less than 10 approved apps during the BlackBerry Got Game Port-A-Thon Program Period and who have not already qualified for the BlackBerry Dev Alpha testing device.

By the end of this week, we will send all eligible developers an email outlining the delivery details of your reward.. We anticipate that qualified vendors will receive their rewards in two to four weeks once we have confirmation that all the apps have been approved.

Here are more details which really impressed me!  There were 645 developers that participated in the live event and 520 developers that are eligible for rewards.  Over 2,000 apps were created for the BlackBerry 10 OS.

Thank you once again to all that participated in the event!

So you have an Android™ Native game and wondering what does it takes to bring your game to BlackBerry® 10 for the launch of the platform? You will be pleasantly surprised how much easier it is to develop a native game using the BlackBerry 10 Native SDK. I have been there myself; as part of the Gaming R&D team, I extended the Open Source and cross-platform Gameplay3D framework support to Android using the Android NDK. In this post, I am going to share my experience working with the two platforms side by side from a game porting point of view.

Tools

As an Android NDK developer, the first thing you will notice is that the BlackBerry 10 Native SDK is an Eclipse based, fully Integrated C++ Development Environment, as opposed to only command line tools provided by the Android Development Tool (ADT). The IDE comes integrated with console, debugger and several BlackBerry 10 OS specific optimization tools. If you are command-line and scripts kind of person, you can use the command line tools available in the $QNX_HOST/usr/bin folder under the installed directory.

Programming Environment

Android NDK allows writing C/C++ code as part of a Java® application in a crude way. Occasionally, the native code is required to call the Java APIs to accomplish certain tasks. On the other hand, the BlackBerry 10 Native SDK provides you with a pure C/C++ environment that works nicely with Open Standard and Open Source software.

Application Lifecycle

Typically, an Android NDK game will comprise of a NativeActivity, and the OS provides the Activity with a native handle to the Android Java App android_app* through android_main() function. The handle can then be used to retrieve the Android application life-cycle events in native. Registering a callback function to the android_app*‘s onAppCmd and polling the eventQueue for events lets you receive all the application lifecycle events.

On the other hand, the BlackBerry 10 Native SDK provides you with a much simpler application model — it runs inside a native QNX process. BlackBerry 10 Native SDK games receive the application lifecycle events through the BlackBerry Platform Services (BPS). To start receiving the events, the BPS system needs to be started at the game startup. The BPS events can be polled in the run loop similar to the Android event handling mechanism and does not require a callback registration to retrieve the events. Once an event is received, handling is straightforward and maps nicely to the Android NDK Game events.

Graphics and Windowing

Both Android NDK and the BlackBerry 10 Native SDK allow access to OpenGL ES 1.x and 2.0, and that makes the game rendering code run seamlessly on both platforms. However, OpenGL ES is ultimately rendered on a native window surface that will be displayed on the screen, and the way to acquire them is different on the two platforms.

On Android, when an application is initialized, a native window is created for the default configurations by the underlying JVM. The native window handle can be obtained from the android_app* application state available through the call back function associated with the onAppCmd. The native window format can be chosen using the ANativeWindow_setBuffers utility function as per the needs of the Application.

On BlackBerry, applications have access to the BlackBerry Platform Windowing System that facilitates creation of Screen Contexts (represents a connection to the windowing server) and Screen Windows (represents an OpenGL ES renderable surface). First, a screen context is created that enables the native windows to be created and lets the application control some of its properties such as pixel format, size, location, etc. Once a Screen Window is created, the EGL API can be used to render the content into the native windows for display.

Handling Input

Registering a callback function to the android_app*‘s onAppCmd and polling the eventQueue for events lets you receive all the input events that the game or app receives. Similar to the BlackBerry application life cycle events, screen events can be obtained through the same BPS service and is straightforward to use.

Audio

Android supports and recommends OpenSL, whereas BlackBerry supports its arguably more widely-accepted cousin OpenAL. Currently, BlackBerry SDK does not support OpenSL, and it is worthwhile writing the audio code using OpenAL. Once ported, you can use the open source implementation of OpenAL for Android and use the ported audio code for Android.

Video

Many games add cut scenes to engage the players in a story mode, and unfortunately in Android NDK there is no straightforward native video API out of the box. Developers porting their games to the BlackBerry 10 Native SDK will be very happy to use the native video multimedia API (mmrenderer) to play a video inside their games.

File system

Android NDK game’s internal and removable external data paths can be obtained from internalDataPath and externalDataPath variables respectively in the native_activity.h.

In a BlackBerry 10 Native SDK game, the files are copied inside the application sandbox under the app/native/ folder and the path for the game itself can be found with the getcwd() function.

Reference code

If you are looking for reference code and design ideas to make your game cross-platform, take a look at the Gameplay3D framework. It is an open-source and cross-platform gaming framework that currently supports BlackBerry, Android, iOS and desktop environments.

A detailed Android to BlackBerry Game porting guide will be available very soon at http://developer.blackberry.com.

We’ve reached many key dates for developers building for BlackBerry® 10, and we want everyone to mark December 11th, 2012 in their calendars. On that date, we will release the gold version of the BlackBerry 10 SDKs. When the Gold SDK is released on December 11th, you can complete your final testing and tweaking and submit your app knowing it will run on the commercial release of BlackBerry 10 smartphone OS.

There will be one other important date before the tools come out of beta – November 29th, 2012. We will release a beta update on November 29th that includes bug fixes, but also an important update for Web developers as our BlackBerry® WebWorks™ HTML5 tools will be updated to offer more functionality and to draw closer to parity with our Native tools. We encourage developers to get their apps ready using this beta SDK release.

A quick recap on calendar:

November 29 – BlackBerry 10 SDK update
November 29-30 – BlackBerry® Jam Asia (in Bangkok, Thailand)
December 11 – BlackBerry 10 Gold SDK launch
January 21 – Deadline to have apps submitted to the BlackBerry App World™ storefront for the 10k Developer Commitment where we guarantee $10,000 USD revenue in the first year (1,2).
January 30 – BlackBerry 10 launch events
February 5-6 – BlackBerry Jam Europe (in Amsterdam)

1) “Earns” refers to the amount that consumers pay for both paid downloads and in-app payments using BlackBerry Payment Service less any refunds and less applicable taxes included in the amount consumers pay, multiplied by the proportion of sales owing to the Vendor as defined by the Vendor Agreement. “Earns” does not include any advertising revenue. See Terms and Conditions for complete details.
2) A maximum of $10,000,000USD will be distributed under this Offer. Limit one (1) payout per Vendor. Twelve month period to be determined by RIM.