Late last night, NeonPlat Raw appeared on the OUYA Dashboard for the very first time.
This is kind of a big deal, in that it's the first time one of my games has officially been released on an actual physical home-console.
True, it's not a "PROPER" console, but .. Hey, it's a box with a controller that plugs into my telly.
And it's got my games on it!
So, Hell yeah, It's proper enough to me!!

If you have an OUYA, you can grab NeonPlat Raw for it.
It's the same version that's available for Windows, Android and HTML5, except now it has proper analogue controls bolted on, too. .. Not that it needs them, but it's nice to have them!.. I guess..



NeonPlat Raw can currently be found in the Sandbox area of your OUYA console. woot!

-=-=-

Alternative Indies

Spinal and CaffeineKid have also recently jumped on the OUYA bandwagon.

CaffeineKid's game "Jumping Jack" is a remake of an old ZX Spectrum classic, and is also currently in the Sandbox section of the OUYA frontend.

Spinal's game "Don't Flip Out" has been out for a bit longer, so has already made it out of the "sandbox" area into the main section, and has even been featured in one of the highlighted areas, which is lovely. o/yeayo/
-=-=-

-=-=-

OUYA Findings : Day One

You need a credit/debit card when you first turn it on. It won't let you in, unless you give it a way to take your money off you.
This seems a bit fucked up, IMO, and hopefully it's something they'll change in the future.
But otherwise setup was easy enough. Hook it all up, get it all going, nice and easy.

OUYA Findings : Developer

Using Monkey as my language, and my wonderfully stable Framework, means that I pretty much didn't have to do much of anything in order to get my game onto the OUYA.

Controls

There was a bit of work that needed to be done to the control schemes, to account for "proper" button layouts, and "proper" analogue controls, but it wasn't anything too tricky. My use of numbers, rather than specific keywords, has helped me out quite a lot.
ie, I use PlayKey(0) for up, 8 for down, 3 for left, 5 for right and then 10,11,12,13 for buttons
To convert to OUYA I only needed to change the function, not my code.
If I'd've done stuff like XBox_Controller.Button(X), then I'd've needed to bugger about with a heck of a lot more code to get it working. Instead, I kept things simple, and it's worked out nicely.

Overscan

The biggest, most baffling issue I had was dealing with Overscan. Since OUYA works on TVs, and TV manufacturers are apparently a bunch of cheap gits who rip you off by not giving you the picture you damn well paid for, you need to deal with Overscan.
Overscan is when the user's telly decides that, even though it accepts a 1920x1080 pixel signal, it's only going to display about 1790x1000 of it, or something similarly stupid. The rest of the image lies outside of the "Safe Zone", inside the TV's giant bevel, or even outside of the TV entirely.
Why this is, is beyond me, because modern TVs are supposed to be "TRUE HD", and are made up of very specific pixels. It smacks of cheapness, and it's rather disturbing to me that Overscan still exists in our High-Definition age.

Anyway, you need to deal with that, so should ensure that nothing's overlapping the edge of the screen. My usual Top-Left Pause-Button is a prime example, and now stands about 64 pixels in from the corner of the screen.
Code-wise, I've added a new slider to the pause menu which lets folk tweak the amount of Overscan using the two shoulder buttons. It seems to work reasonably well.

Tax Stuff

Before you can sell your app, or do any IAP stuff, you need to faff about with Tax Forms and other such "official" stuff.
I've not yet tackled this scary "real-world" area, so haven't yet dealt with any sales or anything like that.
ho-hum..

Connectability

Apparently I can hook up the OUYA to my Laptop, and compile directly to it.
I haven't yet actually even attempted to plug the two together.
Instead, I've been uploading my .apk to my server, then downloading it on the OUYA using it's browser, and using the System/Manage/Storage area to install the app.
It's a bit long-winded, but honestly, it's good enough for me.
Since I'm using my generic framework, I'm able to get plenty of "quick test" stuff done on HTML5/GLFW targets, then only bother to upload for a final test.
It works, and it ensures compatibility.
Sorted!

-=-=-

OUYA Finding : Player

I'm not a player

I've played my game, I've played CaffeineKid's game, I've played Spinal's game, and I played about a minute of TowerFall before realising I enjoyed NeonPlat a heck of a lot more.
This is the full extent of my OUYA gameplaying, thus far.

Menus

It's nice that they've included "Make" as one of the standout areas in the system. To switch on a console, and immediately see a "You can make shit for this!" section is a fantastic thing, as far as I'm concerned!
The current layout works well enough. I can see it getting a little unwieldy once it gets a few hundred more games to display, but much like my own Jayenkai Archive, things get tricky once you've more than a few dozen games to display!
Finding a nice balance will be tricky, but if I'm honest, the current layout is pretty good enough.

Controller

Feels great. The plastic feels nicely middley, somewhere inbetween the cheaptastic plasticy feel of my PS3 DualShock, and the solid robustness of my X360 controller. (I was really surprised how cheap and tacky the PS3 controller felt!)
Sticks have a good solidness, triggers work fine, dpad's a bit spongy but at least appears to work properly unlike the 360 one.

Controller : Issue 1

Missing feature : There's no Start button. It has an OUYA button, but that works as a "Home" button, so you're really missing a standard "Pause" button.. It's not until you start playing that you notice that. It's a strange button to be missing.
For what it's worth, I'll be using (Y) (Topmost face button) as Pause in most of my games.

Controller : Issue 2

Also, it is extremely bloody noisy! Not sure exactly where they bought the plastic from, I can only assume they desperately searched for the world's loudest clicky plastic imaginable! A couple of times I've tried to record videos of me playing, but have had to delete them due to the extreme clunkityness of the audible buttons!

Controller : Issue 3

I've not played enough of any other games to have noticed this, yet, so it may just be NeonPlat, but.. I'm pretty sure it's not NeonPlat!
There seems to be occassional controller quirkyness.
It's as if the inputs are being delayed, somewhere between me hitting the button, and the system responding to it.
It's pretty rare, and in all my time playing NeonPlat I've only noticed it twice, but.. .. When it happens, it's REALLY noticable!!!
I'm not sure what could/couldn't fix this, whether it's my crappy coding, or the controller, or even the OUYA itself.
I'll be fiddling about with different things to see if I can figure it out.
*shrugs*

-=-=-

Overall

I paid ??100 for a brand new console, and within the space of a week, I got my game on it and in it's marketplace.
I'm not really a true gamer, so as far as being a console is concerned, it probably won't get the attention it deserves, but. .. it probably DOES deserve it.
For ??100, as a gamer, you can't fault it. It does exactly what it says it does.
You plug it in, you shove some games on it, you play them.
It's cheap enough, and it works enough, so .. *shrugs*

As a Dev, it's great to see my games working on my Telly. I mean, really great
And having a proper controller, with proper buttons, makes for a much better experience.