It seems Google are taking Android TV very serious this time round. For those with a good memory, you should recall that this is not Google’s first attempt at trying to fulfill your living room TV needs. As such it is not a big surprise that they do not want to make similar mistakes again. Google seems to understand if Android TV is to be successful then they might need to walk developers through the process of developing apps and games for the new android platform. And this seems to be exactly what they are doing.
It was only reported a few days ago how Google are taking an authoritarian approach to Android TV and will be pre-screening all apps and games submitted by third party developers. It now seems that Google may be trying to anticipate problems before they happen. The search giant today launched a new free game called ‘Pie Noon’. Now, this is not your typical sort of game. Although it is a game and can be played, it has been created to try and help show developers how easy it is to create Android TV games. According to the Android Developer’s Blog “Pie Noon serves as a demonstration of how to use the SDL library in Android games as well as Google technologies like Flat buffers, Mathfu, fplutil, and WebP”. Pie Noon hopes to demonstrate how multi-support games should work on Android TV and wants developers to not only try the game, but also take a peek at the source code. As such the game has been released open-source on Github. As well as being open source, Pie Noon is a cross platform game and written in C++
If you are just curious to give the game a go and see how Google is trying to help developers then the game is free and available to download via the Play Store. Pie Moon allows up to 4 players (using Bluetooth controllers) and also allows the use of touch controls. Pie Moon is also compatible with Google Play Games and so you can sign-in, see your scores and leaderboards. If you want further information then click the source link below to head over to the Android Developer Blog. If you want to see what the game looks like they check out the brief video below.