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Unity and Kii Cloud Team Up for the Love of the Game

January 7, 2014 in Games | 6 min. read
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(This guest blog post comes from our online service partner, Kii)

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With Kii, game developers get a fast and scalable backend, powerful analytics and game distribution services, so they can focus on the stuff that matters — the game experience.  Back in September when we released our Unity SDK, we briefly explained what Unity is and how your Unity games can benefit from using Kii Cloud by allowing you to focus on what matters to your players rather than developing the game backend.

We’ve learned a lot about the game development since then, including that practically all successful games have some common components. They start with a great idea, have an awesome user experience, and, they have a scalable backend to support any spikes in growth and ongoing performance needs. The best games also get insights into player behaviors and usage, and create a strong user acquisition machine

While Unity is the gaming engine that transforms an idea into beautiful experience, Kii provides the complete game backend — including tools, insights and a distribution package to help developers aggressively distribute their games

So, we’re excited to announce a partnership with Unity that makes Kii Cloud available via Unity’s Asset Store. Game developers can get their hands on Kii early in the development process so they can add a solid, scalable gaming backend. That means powerful analytics, user management, flexible data storage and retrieval, geolocation and much more. This also means you will have access to more targeted developer communities.  Using Kii Cloud in your game.  If you are a game developer, chances are you’re already using Unity or have at least heard of it — it’s one of the best gaming engines out there. But it might be harder to understand why you need a robust, carrier-grade backend built for games. So we’ll provide examples of how to leverage Kii in your games and also discuss in more detail how we’re taking our Unity commitment to the next level.

Why you need a game backend
As you build a game, you need to determine where you will store data. You can keep everything on the devices themselves, but that makes syncing data across devices and platforms challenging. You could move all data to a server and code all the logic to manage that data, but is that where you want to spend your time and resources? Finally, will it be fast enough to handle that data when your game scales to millions of users?

Building on a backend platform is the best choice for complex games. Our Unity-native SDK lets you easily manage data without sacrificing speed, security or scalability.
A carrier-grade backend also plays a huge role in your frontend user experience, which, as you know, is a determining factor in the success of your game. Response time is a huge part of this, and it depends greatly on your choice of backend.

Middleware that makes your games successful
Making your game competitive—and easier to deploy and manage—depends on the “middleware” pieces you deploy. Components like geolocation, data management, user management, push services and analytics are standard—but not necessarily pieces you should develop yourself. Kii provides these building blocks out of the box.

Track usage behaviors and iterate
You’ll need to understand game metrics like retention, engagement and player behavior to improve game design and monetization. Most popular analytics SDKs only offer “event-based” analytics — meaning when something you want to measure happens in the game, you have to fire an event that gets logged in the backend. This is difficult to maintain, since every time you want to measure a new metric you have to modify your game, redeploy and send new updates to your players. Kii Analytics supports event-based analytics but also leverages user-generated data that’s already being stored in the backend, so you can get deeper insights on the fly without ever touching the deployed game!  In addition to standard analytics, you can create advanced metrics about player-player social interactions, user demographics, usage progress, dropoff points and more—so you can optimize for better design and increased game usage.

Increase the distribution of your game
You’ve built an awesome game, but how do you get people to try it? Through Kii to China, you can distribute your Unity-based games to the world's largest smartphone market. And through Kii's handset and carrier partnerships in Japan, you can also distribute your Unity-based games to the world's best-monetized mobile gaming market.

Unity demos, code and tutorials for Kii Cloud 
Since our addition of asynchronous call support to our Unity SDK (a feature that allows you to use our backend without your players ever noticing it) we have been working on a bunch of Unity demos:

  • KiiUnitySDKSamples is a generic demo that systematically shows all Kii Cloud API calls via the Unity SDK.  It’s not attached to a game, but it’s a Unity project that runs without modification, exposing a Unity-based GUI for interaction.
  • UnityAngryBotsKii takes the official Unity 3D 4.3 AngryBots demo game and makes use of Kii Cloud via the Unity SDK. The demo is under development but it already showcases several Kii features.
  • HelloKii-Unity is a skeleton project that shows basic user management and data management (including queries) in the context of a simple breakout game.  It's included with the Unity SDK package.

Getting started with Kii Cloud for Unity
Want to get started quickly? Check our Unity Quick Start for both Kii Cloud and Kii Analytics SDKs to get up and running in a snap! Alternatively, you can download the Unity Skeleton Project (an empty project with our SDKs already in place) when you create a Unity project on developer.kii.com.  If you’re looking for more advanced examples check out our demo section above.  We will keep working closely with the Unity community to bring you the leanest and fastest cloud backend for your games and hope you enjoy all the resources now at your disposal that will let you build better games and have more fun doing it. You can focus more resources on the things that matter like design and playability when you get rid of backend coding and maintenance.

Don’t hesitate to contact us on the Kii Developer Community to let us know about your Kii-powered games. We’ll be happy to showcase them through our channels.

(This guest blog post comes from our online service partner, Kii!)

January 7, 2014 in Games | 6 min. read

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