Update 1.4: BlackBerry 10, DownloadablePackages, Desktop Publishing and More

The major update 1.4.0 marks an important step in the history of Felgo and brings loads of improvements – let’s have a look at them:

• BlackBerry 10 Support – Publish for a growing new platform without any cost or additional work
• Downloadable Package Support – This component allows to keep your app size small and under the 50MB limit for the app stores
• Desktop App Store Publishing – The new desktop publishing guides make it easy to publish your game to Mac App Store and Windows Store
• Many More Wizards – Start a new project from 12 different templates for popular game genres like platformers, arcade or physics games
• Good Vibrations – Improve user feedback with the new vibration support
• Screenshots – Allow players to take screenshots in the game

Let’s now dive a bit deeper into the improvements of the update…

BlackBerry 10 Support

We are very proud to announce a new key platform Felgo is supporting: Since our launch we have received many customer requests asking for BlackBerry 10 support, so we think it’s time to add it to Felgo, now. 🙂

The great thing about it from a developer perspective is that it comes at no additional costs for our Pro customers! With the quarterly license you can publish for BlackBerry, iOS and Android for $189 per quarter ($63 per month) or with the annual license for $599 per year ($49 per month). The free version allows you to deploy the application to your local BlackBerry device so you can test before you buy.

Publishing in BlackBerry App World offers you a new monetization channel as it is still a young platform and high-quality apps with native performance and without black borders have a higher chance on BlackBerry to be found. This higher visibility and a new market waiting for new games is the perfect chance to spread the word about your game! We are looking forward to new Felgo powered games in the BlackBerry App World – let us know how your games are doing there and feel free to apply for our showcase section to show off your app on the Felgo website.

Downloadable Package Support

The new DownloadablePackage component allows to download additional resources over the web while the game is running. The most popular use cases for downloadable packages are:

• You want to keep your app store binary as small as possible for the first download
• You offer additional content packages with in-app purchases which should be downloaded after a purchase
• Your game apk on Android exceeds the maximum size of 50MB for Google Play Store and you therefore need to download game resources at a later time
• You want to allow 3G download on iOS devices and keep your iOS binary under the download size limit of 50MB

The API is as lean as it can get – in this example an image is stored in the zip package and is shown when the download is finished:

import VPlay 1.0
import QtQuick 1.1

GameWindow {

  DownloadablePackage {
    id: package1

    source: "https://example.com/package1.zip"

    Component.onCompleted: {
      // if this package is not available yet, download it at application start
      package1.download()
    }
  }

  Scene {

    Image {
      source: package1.available ? fileUtils.getMultiPathUrl("package-image.png") : "local-image.png"
    }
  }
}

Publishing Guides for Windows and Mac App Store

Publishing for Windows and the Mac App Store is now fully covered in our publishing guides! Use this possibility to reach more players on new platforms. Thanks to the cross-platform capabilities of Felgo, without any code modifications.

Qt Creator Wizards with Full Game Templates

Starting from Felgo version 1.4.0, you now can choose from 12 different templates for new projects. New templates exist for games with multiple scenes and levels, and for all our demo games. This helps you to speed up development, as you can start with full games of popular genres like arcade, physics, racing, strategy or platformer games.

Vibration & Screenshots

With the new vibrate() function you can improve user feedback in your games or create whole new games built around vibrations. And with captureScreenshot() your players can now take screenshots and display them, for example of levels your users created on their devices.

There is even more in this update like implemented feature requests from our community or bug fixes. See the changelog for all the updates.

Further Improvements compared to last stable release 1.3.0

Compared to the last major update 1.3.0, the last 7 daily builds also brought these improvements that are now available in 1.4.0:

• The LevelEditor is one of the most valuable and time-saving components in Felgo. It can be used during development to create and modify levels for your game, which you can then bundle in your final publishing build. Additionally, you can also integrate the in-game level editor to your published game and let your gamers create new levels. The gamers can then share their levels with the whole game community and thus drive new installs to your game and continuously provide new content so your game stays interesting and on top of the charts. See this powerful component in action in our live app store game Squaby.
• The ItemEditor component allows to change properties at runtime: imagine testing different gravity settings for a physics-based game and see the objects react to the change while you are moving a slider. Or adjusting the applied force of a jumping character without restarting the game and test the different settings. You can have a look at the source code or the live version of the app we built to demonstrate this functionality: the Particle Editor for Cocos2d and Felgo
• In-app purchases are now available with the Store plugin on iOS and Android from a cross-platform and easy-to-use QML API. For benefits of the freemium model and how to implement it, see the full announcement in this blog post.
• Support multiple languages in your game to increase the downloads and for better engaged players. With dedicated translation tools this is a simple process – just follow our guide How to make a multi language game with Felgo.

As you can see, we have been busy bees. 😉 You can look forward to a big announcement for true cross-platform gaming services made by Felgo, and also frequently demanded Ad plugins will be available soon. You can actively steer the direction which features we add first: just use our Roadmap and let us know what you would like to see in the upcoming daily builds.

Users on the Free Plan got upgraded to the previous major version 1.3.0. For all the latest features added in this release, unlimited publishing to iOS, Android and BlackBerry 10, become a Pro Subscriber and stay at the edge of development with daily builds.