Congratulations! Always nice to know that at least one person on allegro.cc gets stuff done

Thanks. I popped a little (= a lot) of champaign last night.

It's basically an Android app with a few minor differences.

• In-app purchase is necessary if your game is not free. http://devs.ouya.tv has a primer that has all the code you need, although it has a few minor bugs you'll have to fix (ie, it won't compile, there's no serious logic bugs in it.)

• At the same site, check out the "Setup" page. It will tell you a lot of things you need to know such as the special OUYA icons, minor changes you need to make to your AndroidManifest.xml etc.

• Right now with Allegro if you have the keyboard driver installed (al_install_keyboard) it will pick up keyboard events from the joystick, so if you also have the joystick driver installed, you'll get two sets of events. I simply don't install the keyboard driver when running on OUYA.

• From memory, the OUYA buttons are:

0 - O
1 - U
2 - Y
3 - A
4 - Left front trigger
5 - Right front trigger
6 - Left thumbstick button
7 - Right thumbstick button
8 - Dpad up
9 - Dpad down
10 - Dpad left
11 - Dpad right
12 - Left back trigger
13 - Right back trigger
And 14 - the "OUYA" button or whatever it's called. You can't really use 14 but during joystick configuration while playing around, I got it to set one of my buttons to it - so you should put in some code to not let the user set that as a button.

• Keep in mind when submitting to the store that they have a thing called "O Factor" (or something) that determines if your game will make it out of the "Sandbox". The Sandbox is where every game starts until it gets a high enough O Factor/Fun Factor. The algorithm isn't exactly known but it uses things like amount of time users play, number of likes etc. So probably not a good idea to make a very tiny demo since it won't get much play time and therefore much fun factor to get out of Sandbox.

• adb logcat is your friend. So is GDB if you can get it set up right. GDB was tricky to get set right but I managed after trying lots of things I found with DuckDuckGo.

• Use Allegro git!

• Can't think of anything else right now, but if you have specific questions I'll answer the best I can.

I'm charging 2.99 to unlock it. The give you daily downloads, daily purchases, purchases by country and crash reports (though they said they're working on more, right now they're simple csv files.) They're updated continuously which is nice. For ratings, all you have is the rating on the console, ie the number of "Likes". And yeah I do think purchases help a lot.

So far the game has moved up in rank since it first appeared, so going good so far. If you have an OUYA go play the game, help me get it out of the Sandbox!

EDIT: BTW, if anyone's interested I posted my thoughts on OUYA after a week with it: http://www.nooskewl.com/content/thoughts-ouya

Thanks!

So far no. The game was already optimized for Android phones and tablets so it runs great on OUYA. Even with the 1920x1080 screen.

EDIT: The game's one sale for 99 cents for another hour and 20 minutes. There's someone out there with an OUYA besides me right???

I'm hearing an awful lot of complaints about this system, but what else is new? The best is the price of games. I think the most expensive game is $15. And it's exceptionally good quality. I don't see what people are complaining about. Too used to phone game prices.

I don't understand the complainers. I think it is mainly that people are "offended" by the idea that they don't need to drop $500 on a console to have some fun.

I tried a handful of games last night on my OUYA, some are ok but overall nothing is worth buying IMO. Most games are mediocre, either in terms of gameplay, graphics, or both. If you put an NES/SNES/Sega emulator on there (of which there are a few in the OUYA store) you get access to dozens/hundreds of games that pretty much outclass most of the stuff on the OUYA store.

I think theres loads of room for quality indie games and I hope they show up one day. No offense to Trent, M2 looks like a nice game I just don't have the patience to play RPG's anymore.

Ok I'll try that one.

I bought the Ouya for video games at the office... specifically for emulators. Whether or not there are any good games for it is irrelevant to me, as that's not why I bought it. The only game I've bought is Towerfall, which to me is the perfect Ouya type of game.

Anyway, I downloaded and +1'd Monster RPG 2 today. I thought it was in the 4th spot, but maybe it was 5th.

According to some stats I saw, people are seeing around 1% to 5% conversion from demos to paid games. To me, that's not bad, but if you are only charging $1, then you need about 5M downloads to pay for the development of a small game (assuming it wasn't thrown together in a month).

Once they see that I like something, it goes right out of the sandbox and into the VIP list.

I much prefer using PS3 or XBox 360 controllers on the Ouya. I haven't had any issue with them failing to work once successfully paired, but it can take a song and dance to get them to start working.

What annoys me more is how terribly slow the JavaScript is on their website. How can they make a list of 300 games be so unresponsive.

I bought a couple of games, so I'll request that they have a LEVERTON "play list."

• "Hidden in Plain Sight", $1. It's a game that I could make in a day. And that's okay, if it didn't suffer from some poorly thought out rules. e.g., On thief mode, one player tries to steal coins while the other (sniper) tries to figure out who he is and kill him in three shots. But if you just fire off three shots, the game ends immediately, the thief collects 0 coins, and you can proclaim yourself the winner.

  But that said, it's still a decent multiplayer game if you make up your own house rules for winning.

  
  

• "Retro Racing", $5. A cross between NES' Micro Machines & Off Road that somehow comes across as a boring, uninspired racing game. It's solid for short periods of multiplayer, but lacks something extra to make it really fun to play. Perhaps it's just the dreary announcing of power ups that ruins it.