Ouya begins shipping developer consoles | Hacker News Reader

Ouya begins shipping developer consoles

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78 pointsabdophoto31 comments

Awesome. I'm very excited about the OUYA, both as a user and seeing how well it does in the market. I think they have several things going for them

- It should be very easy to "port" games. Since you can already hook up controllers to Android and many phones come with D-pads, many games would probably already work as they are. Although touch is essential to many games (Angry Birds) many other games suffer by having touch controls (racing games, shooter games etc).

- It should be possible to use a tablet or phone to provide touch if you need it.

- It'll run Android apps - Netflix, YouTube, Al Jazeera etc. It'll make it easy to get a huge amount of content you want from the get-go.

- Write and distribute apps easily. If something's missing from your console, just go ahead and write it. Hopefully they follow Google's model here - low registration fee, no reviews.

- unlike traditional consoles, they should be able to follow a model closer to tablets and phones - yearly hardware upgrades, keep the price low, but still sell it at a profit.

Even if I never buy an Ouya, I'm rooting for it. The fact that more Android games might start supporting D-Pad's and other traditional game controllers will benefit all Android gamers.

The OUYA controller has a built-in touchpad for pseudo-touch support.

> touch is essential to many games (Angry Birds)

I think Roku would like to argue that point with you, considering that Angry Birds was their flagship launch title for their new devices with motion-sensitive controllers.

I'm more curious than anything about what the SDK they say they're going to release is going to be like.

Is it just the android SDK?

I'm honestly puzzled as to what they plan to release. It's an android device. The google SDK and NDK let you write apps for that.

What's the SDK for?

They have their own launcher environment to support, in game menus, and controllers. Dont some handset manufacturers offer customized SDKs for less reason?

The biggie is in-app purchase support.

I'm kinda bummed I didn't get in on the Kickstarter to get one of these. I have emailed them and found out that I could purchase one for $800, but I simply can't afford that right now. It's a longshot, but if anyone out there is getting a dev console and has changed their mind or just doesn't envision having time to play with it, I'd be happy to buy it off of you... get in touch :)

Just to be clear, you don't need an $800 console to develop for OUYA. You can start with the ouya SDK which is supposed to be released tomorrow. Then when the console actually launches in March, you can use that as you would a dev console.

Also:

OUYA’s board is powered by an NVIDIA Tegra 3 processor. So, if you’re on a kamikaze mission to ship the first ever game for OUYA and can’t wait to receive your dev unit to begin testing your game’s (or games’) performance, just pick up any Tegra 3 Android tablet… That’ll give you an accurate representation as to how your game will perform on an OUYA.

Taken from http://www.ouya.tv/game-developers-how-to-get-started-on-ouy...

http://www.ouya.tv/its-open-season/

Guess the number, win a console!

@breon won, there's 120 per pallet.

I can't wait to get my dev console. Not sure what game I'm going to build, but I'm super jazzed either way.

Want to collaborate on getting MOAI working?

Actually I'm not that excited about Ouya. I'm more excited about controllers (like Moga) you can use with any Android device, so you can play on a TV box or a tablet.

At this point ios/android are nearly as standardized and ubiquitous as TVs were when home consoles started to boom. The 'console', then, is now just the controller. What is stopping companies from launching a controller for mobile exactly as if it were a new console (think launch titles and early game announcements from 1st and 3rd parties)?

Nothing. See: greenthrottle.com

You can get a USB-OTG cable and connect your regular controller to your phone, mine works fine.

Are those really necessary? Can't you already do this with a PS3 controller?

Great news.

I look forward to getting one of these and messing around with development for it when they are officially released, but didn't plunk down the massive costs they were asking for the early access dev consoles.

I might have been enticed to pay like 2x the price for the early hardware, but 7x was a bit much for an individual just to evaluate it.

Hope it takes off. Between this and the so-called Steambox I have high hopes for increased openness in mainstream-accessible game consoles.

Does anyone who has one already, want to collaborate on getting MOAI on it? (http://getmoai.com/) If so, drop me an email and I'll gladly assist ..

Apart from running benchmarks to get a grasp on the performance characteristics (which I'm sure will leak out in post haste) wouldn't the SDK simply be enough for you to get your framework ported? That release is supposed to be in just a few more days.

Why do you need hardware? (honest question, not being snarky)

I don't need hardware, but if you've got it, then you could do the work and I could assist you. I don't need access to hardware, but I'd sure like to know that MOAI is running smoothly with the Ouya ODK as soon as possible .. ;) (I'm working on a number of MOAI titles that I'd like to ship on Ouya one day..)

The way I see it maybe working is, you could build MOAI from sources, install a test app on the Ouya, and any incompatabilities/problems encountered, we could work out together .. for example, adding hardware game controller support is probably a bit of an issue, but since I know my way around that, I could help you get it implemented, or even just implement it and .. as long as you were willing .. you could test against the real hardware.

Sure, I could just use the ODK. But I'd be a little more motivated to solve any issues if I knew someone who actually had the device in front of them to test with ..

Anyway, just an idea. If you get the interest, let me know and we can get cracking! :)

EDIT: sorry, I assumed you have the hardware already. All of the above goes for anyone who actually does have it - just contact me.

Why would somebody want to do your company's work for them?

Maybe they'd like to be using MOAI productively as well, and besides that: I'm not "a company" but rather an individual developer who is willing to contribute to the community - of Ouya developers, Ouya users, and MOAI developers. Understood?

Good question.

MOAI already runs fine on android devices. I can't see any reason you'd need to 'port' it to the Ouya, unless they've done something ridiculously dumb like making Ouya not Android compliant (but that would just be stupid beyond words, and I've heard nothing along those lines, so I doubt it).

Hardware game controller support on Android (within MOAI) is not implemented, and would need to be done according to the ODK. Also, it very definitely needs to be tested ..

I kind of like to play a game during development (with the actual control interface).

Off topic: are you guys still using proclauch to run your services?

If you're talking to me, I'm not part of the MOAI team, I'm just an independent developer who wants to contribute to the effort of getting MOAI running smoothly on Ouya .. my offer stands for anyone else is interested.

Vvvvv...

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