Good afternoon, everybody. My name is Jeff Watkins, and I'm an iOS engineer on the Game Center team. And today, I have the pleasure of talking to you about some of the new features in GameCenter. Now, as you would expect, there are a lot of things under the covers that are new.

We've accelerated authentication, so now your players can get into the game a lot faster. We've also accelerated things like submitting scores and achievements, so they take fewer system resources. But really, that's the sort of thing that you've just come to expect from us with each rep of the software.

So they don't merit any more talking. But we've talked to you guys a lot over the last year or so. And whether you're a veteran of the game industry and you've been making games since I was actually good at them, like back in Dig Dug days, or you're brand new to building games for iOS, you all have one thing in common. You're the reason I can't get my iPad back for my daughter.

And it's really quite fantastic what you guys are doing with games. They're really, really amazing. The sorts of things that you guys are doing on these little devices is just incredible. It's the sort of thing that you'd have to take a workstation from five years ago to have done, and now it's on a little phone. It's really amazing. And the fact is, these are really fun games. And you're looking for something to set your games apart from all the others. You're looking for an edge.

You're looking for something that's going to make your game a success. But I hope you're looking for something more than that. You're looking for something to make your game a huge success. Now, there are a lot of factors that go into making a game successful. You've probably heard lots of things about successful applications all throughout the conference so far. But there really are three specific things that we want to talk about in terms of games that we think are really critical to the success of all of your games.

The first of those is discoverable. Your game has to be discoverable. And by that, I mean people have to find it, right? If they don't find the game, they're not going to download it. If they don't download it, they won't play it. If they don't play it, they won't have fun, they won't tell their friends, and more people won't experience your game.

Second, your game has to be polished. And this goes way beyond 3D graphics and fancy sprites and immersive 3D sound. There's a basic level of functionality that all players expect now, and your game has to support that. And finally, your game has to be fun. If it's not fun, That's all over. You're going to have to go back to the financial industry and write stock trading software and cry yourself to sleep every night.

So those are the three things we're going to talk about today. Now let's dive right in with number one. Discoverable. So what do I mean by discoverable? If you think about how you learn about games, you learn about games from your friends. And we think that one of the best places to learn about games is through Game Center.

Game Center is fantastic for games. You wouldn't expect me to say that since I am a Game Center engineer. But the fact is Game Center is terrific. We've got 130 million players. Now, those people aren't just signing up for the latest social networking craze and then doing nothing.

They're out there, they're playing games, they're having a tremendous amount of fun. In fact, they're playing so many games that they're submitting 5 billion scores every week. That's a mind-blowing number. It's actually amazing to me, frankly, that these folks get anything done because they're having so much fun playing your games. In fact, we all play your games a little bit too much too. So, 5 billion scores, 130 million players.

Of the top 100 games, 67 of them are Game Center games. And we find that Game Center games cluster near the top. So Game Center games are typically rated higher and are downloaded more than other games. So those of you who have games in Game Center, you know exactly what I'm talking about. This is a fantastic party.

Folks are out there, they're playing games, they're having a lot of fun. Those of you who don't have games in Game Center yet, dude, what are you waiting for? This is the thing you've got to take advantage of. So how does a party get started? Well, it all gets started with game recommendations. You want to have some games on your device.

And the best way to get games, we find, is to recommend games that you already like playing. So, for example, later we're going to talk about Aideen, and she's a racing fan, she has stock car racing games, sailboat racing games, and now she's branching out to space racing games. So naturally, if there's a new racing game out there, we're going to recommend the racing game to Aideen.

But also, we'll recommend games to Aideen based on the games her friends play. So her friend Bill loves Railroad Empire, so naturally you're going to recommend that game as well, because it only makes sense that the games that your friends play, you might want to play with them.

Now, friends, pretty important deal, especially if they're going to get game recommendations for you. So friend recommendations are also an integral part of Game Center. Now, we'll recommend friends by the games you play. So to Aideen, we'll recommend players that also like racing games. But we can also now, in iOS 6, We can recommend friends based on your Facebook profile. So you can link your Game Center account with your Facebook account, and right away you can find all of your friends from Facebook, you can find their Game Center profiles. And we think this is a great way to get players' friend graphs up and running very quickly.

Now, friends are really important. Every afternoon special you've ever seen drums that into your head. Friends are your lifeline. They do everything for you. If you think about how you and your friends interact regarding games, you can see why friends are so important. When my team and I are hanging out playing games, we don't just play the game. We talk about the games we have played. In fact, most of the games that I enjoy playing with my family, I discovered because of my friends. And so friends are crucial to the discoverability of your game.

So friends tell friends about games. It's that simple, right? Baked into Game Center from day one has been the ability to tell your friends about the games you're playing. All you have to do is tap that little button, up comes an email sheet, you address it to some of your friends and whoosh, now they know.

That's a good start. And in iOS 5, we added in-app rating. So previously, you had to ask players to pop off to the app store and rate your game and maybe write a review. But now, right after they finish playing and they've had a great time, they bring up their leaderboard to see how they compare against their friends, and right there they can rate your game and let everybody in the app store know what a great game you've built. Now, this is pretty critical, right, because you can imagine we recommend games that are five stars before we'll recommend games that are one star.

Now, we can't hide it. Up there in the top right-hand corner is a brand-new feature in iOS 6, the Facebook Like button. Now, if your players have Facebook accounts, they can tap on the Like button, and that will send a message off to Facebook, and in their friends' news feeds, they'll see the fact that you like this game. Now, when their friends tap on the link, we'll take them directly to the App Store, and they can download your game. We think this is a fantastic way for your players to spread the word about what a great game you've built.

Now, your friends, when you're playing games and you're talking about games, we don't stop at just telling each other about new games, do we? If your friends are anything like my friends, they kind of, shall we say, brag about their scores. And it makes me feel a little bad because I'm a terrible game player.

But we wanted to take advantage of that, right? Because this is the sort of energy that players already have. They're already doing this activity. So let's give them the facility to do that right inside Game Center. So here you'll see the brand-new score and achievement detail. And right there is the share button. All your players have to do is tap on that.

and they'll get the system-wide UI activity view controller. And from there, they can share their scores and achievements via email, via iMessage, via Twitter or Facebook. In this case, I'm going to tap on Facebook. Up comes the system composed sheet for Facebook. We've prepopulated that with information about the game they're playing and a link to Game Center. When the player taps post, all of his friends' devices will see the update to their Facebook or Twitter or any other social network stream with the information about the liked and the shared score.

So that's great, right? We could bring them to the App Store, but that's not really how we wanted to do this. So when they tap on that link, we'll actually bring them into Game Center and we'll show them the achievement or the score that the player has shared.

And when they tap on that link, we'll actually bring them into Game Center and right there from inside Game Center, if they don't already have the game, they can download the game. Plus, if they're not already friends via Game Center, there'll be a button there to send a friend request so that now they'll have found another friend via their social networking. So shared scores and achievements are great, and that's part of the equation.

But my friends don't stop at sharing their scores with me, much as I wish they would. They also go on to challenge me to try and beat their scores. And so we've built that right into Game Center. Challenges are gonna be huge. Now, the important thing that you're probably asking yourself is, jeez, how much code do I have to write to take advantage of challenges?

I won't kid you. You can write code to take advantage of challenges, but you don't have to. Out of the box in iOS 6, every game that supports scores and achievements supports challenges. Now this is gonna be big. As you saw this morning, Jetpack Joyride, they did a great job of integrating challenges in just a few days. And we think it adds a much richer degree of immersion to the game.

So the way this works is we tap on the challenge friends button and up comes the friend picker. Right there, I can pick some of my friends to send the challenge to. And I want to call your attention to something. You'll see that we've broken this off into two parts.

We have the friends who play the game, of course, but we also have friends who don't play the game. And that's actually critical. Because you can send challenges to friends who don't play the game. And when they get the challenge notification, they can tap on the banner or bring it up in the notification center and they'll get taken right to the app store. They can download the game and then bam, they can start playing and beat the challenge. So once I've picked my friends, then I get a chance to send a little personal message. In my case, it's almost always snarky. But I click send or tap send.

And off it goes. The push notification goes to my friends, and they get the banner that comes down. And lo and behold, they get an opportunity to jump inside the game and start playing. So challenges are really a big deal because they take a single-player game and they raise it up to the level of a multiplayer game because it brings their friends into the equation. We think it's going to be a great feature for your games.

Now, multiplayer is a big deal, as well, right? People like playing games with other people. And that's why we all get together around a board game and spend far too much time there. And multiplayer invitations are also a critical aspect to the discoverability of your game, right? Because if you think about it, one of the things that happens a lot is someone will say, hey, let's go play this game. Right there, you don't have the game, but you're going to go play and you're going to have fun.

So, Aideen, as I said, she's a big racing game fan and she wants to play the latest space pylon game with her buddies Bill, Claire, sets everything up, brings up the matchmaking interface, sends out the invitations. Bill gets the invitation. Claire and Deirdre get the invitation. But they're not big gamers. So from the invitation, we take them to the app store where they can download Space Pylon.

And the moment they download it, they get brought into the game and they're ready to go. So, as happens very frequently in cases like this, Claire knocks their socks off. She wins handily. For some reason, she's just naturally good at racing games. What happens in cases like this, right?

Somebody says, "Hey, no fair. Let's play that again." Well, I'm happy to say we now support a really easy way to just kick off a brand new match and all you have to do at the end of the game is you call rematch with completion handler and the moment that's done, you've got a new match all set up, ready to go, and your players can continue to play and continue to have fun. And remember, the more fun they have, the more likely they are to tell their friends about what a great game you've built.

So in iOS 5, we introduced turn-based multiplayer gaming. And this is really a great way for players to play games because there's a lot of times when you only have a few minutes to play a game. Maybe you're in line at the bank or picking up the kids or whatever. You've got a few minutes. You take your phone out or your iPad out. You take the turn that you've got earlier today. And you can just have a little bit of fun in the time that you have, put your phone away, and then you go.

So let me recap exactly how turn-based multiplayer works, and then we'll get into some of the new features we've added. So remember, in iOS 5, Aideen would send out the invitations, and before Bill, Claire, and Deirdre even get the invitation, she gets to take her turn. So when she's done with her turn, she passes the turn off to Bill.

Now, it turns out that Bill's hiking out in Yosemite, so he doesn't get the notification. And in iOS 5, that's it. The game will now stand here until Bill goes into the game, discovers he's got a turn, and continues on. The sad thing is that Claire and Deirdre don't get the invitation, they don't get to download the game, they don't get to have fun.

So one thing we've heard loud and clear from developers is that this is not the experience they want for their games. So we've added turn-based timeouts in iOS 6 so that now, after a period of time that you specify, Bill's turn will time out and it will pass to Claire.

Claire can take her turn, and now your game has a number of options. You can choose to simply drop Bill from the game and continue on with, like, three players. Or you can give someone, perhaps Claire or Aideen, the opportunity to invite someone to replace Bill. Maybe you want to invite Edward and keep on going with a four-player game. Or as we're going to do, we're going to rearrange the participants so that Bill gets another chance.

and Claire then passes the turn to Bill, and it turns out he's at a restaurant, they have free Wi-Fi, lo and behold, he gets the turn notification, and so instead of spending time with his family, he starts playing the game. When he's done, the notification passes to Deirdre, she gets the invitation, she downloads the game, and she starts playing. So turn-based timeouts are really a big deal to ensure that everyone gets to play. And by ensuring everyone gets to play, you ensure everybody gets to download the game.

The way you take advantage of this couldn't be simpler. There's a new ntern with next participants API. You call that and you pass in an array of participants. That array is all the participants in order that they should take their next turn. And we recommend that the player who just finished his turn be added to the array perhaps as the last player. And the reason for that is that's the only way you can ensure that if everyone times out, the turn passes back to someone who at least was present.

And at that point, then, perhaps your game can kick it off again or do something else. You can specify a timeout period. We have a number of constants. I believe we have, like, one day, one week, one month, one millennia, that kind of thing. And also, naturally, the match data.

Also in iOS 6, we've added the ability to save match data during the turn. And this is really critical if you have a game that has multiple phases. Or perhaps let's say you have like a trivia game where with each question, the same player gets to keep his turn. And as he answers each question, you save the match data, the notification goes out to all the participants, and everything updates. So that's turn-based timeouts. And we think this is a real critical element to preventing abandoned games. And an abandoned game, of course, isn't a fun game.

Now, as you heard, Game Center is now available on Macs. And this is fantastic, right? The same environment that everybody is familiar with, those 130 million players, now they can play games on their OS X devices. And they can play multiplayer games amongst their friends. And they can also play multiplayer games on their iOS devices. Wouldn't it be great if they could play all together?

Well, that's what game groups does for us. You can group your games by any logical group that you see fit so that your iPad games and your OS X games can play together, your iPad version and your phone version can play together. And if you have themed versions of your games, maybe you have the Alliance version of Space Pylon and the Armada version of Space Pylon, normally, Aideen and Bill can play, you know, by themselves, but now with game groups, they can actually race together on common courses. So Aideen will fly the Alliance ships and Bill will fly the Armada ships, and they can race together to see who's better, Alliance or Armada.

And if you have themed versions of your games, maybe you have the Alliance version of Space Pylon and the Armada version of Space Pylon, normally, Aideen and Bill can play by themselves, but now with game groups, they can actually race together on common courses. So Aideen will fly the Alliance ships and Bill will fly the Armada ships, and they can race together to see who's better, Alliance or Armada.

Now, because Aideen's such a huge racing fan, after she plays against Bill a couple of times, she's going to want to download the Armada version of the game. And it would be kind of a drag if some of the scores and achievements that she's earned weren't able to be passed over to the new game. Well, fortunately, Game Groups solves that problem.

So when she downloads the Armada version of the game, the scores and achievements that you've defined to be in common amongst these different versions will automatically appear in that version. So perhaps she gets an achievement for going through the tutorial. She doesn't need to do that again for Armada unless there is a specific tutorial for Armada.

So this is a great way for your players to move between games, play their games with other friends, and discover new games. Because, for example, if they're playing the game on their Mac, they can send an invitation to their friend regardless of what device that friend has. And if the friend is on an OS X device, They get a notification there.

Perhaps they don't have the game yet on that device. They can download it from the Mac App Store and they're good to go. So all of these things are really important ingredients that go into making your game discoverable. Friends telling their friends, sharing their scores, challenging their friends to beat the scores. This is all going to get the word out about what a great game you've built.

So, next, I want to talk about polished. Polished games are the sorts of games that really do stand out. They're the ones that people talk about and they comment about the neat particle effects and the immersive sound, but they also comment on the fact that it just has the features they expect.

So they come to realize that now they can share their scores and they can challenge their friends, and they don't want to leave your game. You've built such a great game, they don't want to change -- they want to swap out to a game center, they might get distracted and just not come back. So right inside game center, you can bring all of the game center features right inside your game. And that's going to be a critical function for you guys. But it starts even earlier than that. It starts with authentication.

Because that's the first experience your players have with your game. And we didn't want to get in the way. We didn't want to pop up splash screens or alerts or anything like that, for the vast majority of the cases, All they'll see is the usual Game Center banner. Pop. And they're good to go.

Now, if your game is the Lucky Game, that's the first one on their device that they've ever played, they'll get a welcome screen like this. They'll have the opportunity to pick a nickname, maybe find some friends via their contacts, and they'll be good to go. As soon as they click tap done, we'll log them in just as we would anyone else, and they're ready to play.

Now, we heard from you guys that authentication wasn't perfect, right? I mean, consider the following scenario. You've got this dungeon crawl, and you're running from a monster. Up ahead is this pit of boiling acid, and all of a sudden, whoosh, welcome to the game center. What do you do?

The game is still running. You have no idea. Well, fortunately, in iOS 6, we've changed the way authentication works just a little bit, and we'll cover that in a moment. Some of your players, though, they're going to opt out of game center. You have to be prepared for that.

In the integrating game center talk, we go into a lot greater depth for how authentication works, including some of those errors that you'll encounter. And those folks who've opted out, they'll get this little dialogue box. They can come back any time just by launching game center. So the way it all works now -- is in your application did finish launching with options method. You'll grab the local player, set up an authentication handler, and then call authenticate. Now, the actual authentication handler is pretty simple.

The first thing you'll notice is we pass a view controller. And this is actually critical to solving the problem that you guys highlighted, which was, hey, I don't know what to do. I don't know how to pause my game when you put up your UI. So now we'll pass you this view controller, and at the time that's appropriate for you, you can pause the game, present the view controller, and give the player the opportunity to sign into Game Center.

Now, keep in mind, until you present the view controller, you can't submit any scores, you can't submit achievements, you can't look up challenges, you can't do anything with Game Center. So do take that opportunity to pause the game and present the view controller. And when the view controller's been dismissed, we'll call your authentication handler again.

And in most cases, the player will be authenticated, and all you want to do is go ahead and enable the Game Center features for that player. Now, one thing to be aware of is we'll also call your authentication handler each time your game comes back to the foreground. And the reason we do that is because during that intervening time, the players may have changed.

So Aideen may have handed off her phone to a friend to let her play the game. Her friend logs into Game Center, launches, comes back to the game, and when we call your authentication handler, it's incumbent upon you to discover, oh, look, it's somebody new. Put aside Aideen's game and get ready for a new one. This is a really simple change that you can make to all of your games.

Now, the unified experience is brand new in iOS 6. We've revamped all of the in-game UI that you'll see, and it starts As you saw earlier, we've got the in-game rating, we've also got the Facebook like button, and the standard leaderboards that you're familiar with. But when your players drill down into those leaderboards, they can drill down further into their scores and their friends' scores, and they can share them and they can challenge them right from inside your game. And this is exactly what they're going to come to expect from all games. So it's important that it be in yours as well.

Obviously, we have the same facility for achievements. They can drill into their achievements and challenge their friends and share those achievements as well. Now, you wouldn't expect us to leave challenges out of the mix because they're such an important feature. So now they can drill into their challenges, they can either dismiss them, or if your game supports the challenge delegate methods, they can actually tap on play now to launch the challenge and off they go.

So this is a great set of features that you can take advantage of. And the truth is, it's only about three lines of code. So strip the comments out of here, and it's really, really simple to bring up the unified experience. First, you want to grab the view controller. There's just one of them.

Then you set a delegate. And the only reason for the delegate is to let you know that the view controller has been dismissed. There's nothing more you need to do. Finally, you present the view controller and you're good. So you get all of that rich functionality with just three lines of code. Now obviously, these features are all built on APIs that you have access to. So you can build out all of this functionality yourself, or you can take advantage of what we've already built.

Leaderboards, if you want to show a specific leaderboard, it's really easy. Three lines more code, you tell us, hey, let's show some leaderboards, the scope of the leaderboards, and then which leaderboard to show. Similarly, achievements and challenges are a single line extra code. So I think you'll find that taking advantage of the new unified experience is a really easy addition for your game.

Now, naturally, we didn't want to just stop with leaderboards, achievements, and scores, right? Because there's so much more to Game Center. There's all of that multiplayer experience. And so in iOS 6, we've completely revamped the multiplayer matchmaking experience. First of all, we streamlined it. So now you start off with the maximum number of players that you specify.

And this really helps your players get in and get playing right away. Because if all they want to do is play the game, they just tap play and they're playing. And they can remove players fairly easy just by tapping on the X. They can add new players back in by tapping on the resulting square.

Then they can invite their friends simply by tapping invite friends, and we have a new friend picker that gives them the option to just tap, you know, three times, they get exactly who they want in the game, and tap next to send a personalized message. Or they can pick players that they've played with recently. Now these don't have to be friends.

They're just people that they played this game with recently. So if they auto matched last time and they just want to play with those folks again, they don't have to, you know, send friend requests and do all that rigmarole. They just jump back in, pick the same people, and play a new game.

And finally, what we think is going to be a huge deal for everybody's game is local multiplayer. Now, you've always been able to invite local players, but you had to do all the work. Buried deep down in the APIs was the GK session stuff and you could find out who was out there. But it was a bit of work. Now we've built that right into the multiplayer matchmaking APIs so that you don't have to do anything.

The theory being, hey, Bill is on his way to Yosemite in the backseat, his two kids would love to play a game, right? Before, the game had to be coded to especially handle that. Now every game can handle that. I think this is a big deal, especially when it comes to party circumstances.

Now, bringing up the multiplayer matchmaking experience is a little bit more complicated, but then again, you'd expect it to be, right? First, you have to tell us about your match. What's the minimum number of players? What's the maximum number of players? And there's some other options. If you're interested, you really should go to the multiplayer gaming session on Thursday.

After that, you create the view controller. You set your delegates so that you can know about some of the matchmaking events that will occur before the game starts. And then, obviously, you want to present that so that your players can interact with it. And that's it. When you're done there, your delegate will get a callback saying, "Game's ready," and off you go. You get dropped right into the game. You can use the same multiplayer APIs you're familiar with, and your game goes.

That's the baseline level of polish that we think every game is going to require in order to be successful. You'll need to be able to send challenges, share scores, and multiplayer matching with local players. It's going to be great. All of these things combined together allow you to focus on what's really important. And what's really important is building a fun game. Right? I mean, that's why people play your games.

Now, there's a lot of things that we've seen that go into making a fun game, but one of the ones that we'd like to highlight today is the games that focus on players, scores, and achievements. From the very beginning, they're the ones that wind up being the most fun.

If you think about games like Jetpack Joyride and Temple Run, as you're running through the game, as you're flying through the lab, what do you see? You see these little banners with your buddies' names on them because you've just passed their distance. And that gives you the immersive experience that really draws you into the game.

And we'd like to challenge you to go a little bit further than that. We'd like to take advantage of something you heard about this morning, the context on a GK score. This really is an underused bit of goodness. You have 64 bits that you can do anything with. Any crazy idea that pops into your head, this is your data.

So let's look at a couple of things that we were able to think of, and I'm sure you'll come up with something even better. So first of all, we've got space pylon, right? Wouldn't it be nice if we took two bits and encoded the color scheme of the spaceship?

Well, we still have 62 bits to work with, so let's take another four to six bits and encode the style of spaceship. So now I know whether I'm flying the Alliance fighter jet or the Armada Raider. All there in the scores. And that gives me a lot of power as I'm showing my leaderboards. So, maybe at the end of the game I can show up all the players who are doing a little bit better than me. All my friends, right?

I mean, this is a pretty common experience in games. Here's your score, here's the guys who are ahead of you. Well, wouldn't it be great if your players could tap on those scores and they could see exactly the ship configuration or the player class or the weapons or whatever that makes sense to that score? Wouldn't it be neat if they could say, "Oh, I could get that and I bet that would help me play the game." Now, 64 bits is a lot, but it's not everything, right?

You can't encode all of the data that they did this morning in 64 bits. It's just not possible. So what you can do is you can collect all of the telemetry, all of the random number seeds, all of the data that you needed to do to create that experience and save it off to a server somewhere as a ghost lap. And then you can replay that information at any time. So instead of just seeing, oh, look, he was flying a red Alliance fighter jet, I can actually see the path that he took around the course that helped him get such a high score.

Now, scores and context, that's pretty cool, right? And there's great things that you can do by putting just a little bit more information into the scores so that you can pull it back out later. But where it gets really cool is when you add challenges, as you saw this morning.

Because scores and context and challenges That's pure awesome. The sorts of things that we saw this morning with the ghost lap as Adam and Joe were competing right there, that's fantastic. We'd love to see you guys take advantage of things like that. And I know it's a little bit extra work on your part, but it really is going to give a great experience for your players.

So instead of getting my challenge to finish the course in under 3 minutes and 15 seconds, in any old fighter that I want to fly, wouldn't it be great if your players could have the option of flying in exactly the configuration that the challenger flew in? It would really enrich the experience for them.

Now, game groups are another key technology that you can take advantage of. to make your games just that more immersive? So for example, Aideen flies Alliance and Bill flies Armada. Great games. They play together, they can fly on common racecourses, right? But wouldn't it be great to give Aideen the experience of playing Armada in a multiplayer setting?

And the way you can do that, and encourage Aideen to try out the Armada version of the game, is take advantage of player attributes when you set up the matchmaking, so that Bill is the host, and when the game gets connected, Aideen is sent all of the assets, so that she has the opportunity to fly one of the Armada Raiders, and fly on one of the cool Armada racecourses, with all the alien buildings and the whole nine yards.

This is a great way to expose players to games that they might not otherwise have. All part of the game group that you've built. And we think it's going to be a great way to expose people to your games. So those are just a couple of Game Center ways that you can enhance your games and make them a little bit more fun. There's a couple of other technologies that you might have heard about this morning that we also think are a great way to raise the bar on the fun level of your game.

The first is Airplay. Airplay is a perfect match for turn-based games. If you think about it, when you're playing a board game, you've got this big public experience, the board. Maybe you're playing Railroad Empire, and you can see the routes that your buddies have all claimed. You can see whatever special actions are in effect. There's all this public information, but then there's the private information, right?

That's the information on your device. And maybe that's your special actions or your special abilities or the routes you're trying to complete. And it's a perfect match here. Only one device has to be broadcasting to the big screen, and you don't have to worry about frame rates or anything else like that, because by and large, it's a pretty static display.

Fantastic fit. Now, also, Party games like this are a great fit for local multiplayer, right, because all it takes is one person to start up the game and everybody else can just jump right in. Don't even have to know they're there. They can just jump in, play the game. Fantastic for party games. The other big one, frankly, is iCloud. How many times have you been playing a game, you've gotten lots of power-ups, you've bought special equipment for your ship, then you move over to your iPad, and it's gone?

It's not just long-running games that have game state. Sure, in your dungeon crawl, you want to save exactly where you are in the dungeon and what monsters you killed and what loot is where. But it also is really important for short-running games. So it's a great idea at any point that your game is complete to save that information up to iCloud so that it's available across devices.

So when I go home and I play on my iPad, I get all of the same achievements and power-ups and coins and everything else that I've been playing with all day long instead of doing my work. And the key to all of this is you want to use the ID of the game group as the index on iCloud. Because that will give you a common index across all of your games so that they can all access the same data.

So those are a couple of things that we want you to think about when you think about how can I make my game even more fun. Now, naturally, you're already building fun games or we wouldn't be having this discussion. But there's so much more that can be done.

There are great technologies that you can take advantage of Game Center and then focus on all the other great stuff you'd like to add to your game. Naturally, like I said, there's this base level of polish that you're going to want every game to have. And we think Game Center is a perfect way to take advantage of that.

And of course, Game Center, it's the key to making your game discovered, right? There's lots of players out there, 130 million of them. They're sending in 5 billion scores. They're going to tell their friends about what a fun game you've made. And those friends are going to download the game, they're going to tell their friends, and you know the rest of that.

So if there's any more information that you need, naturally you want to contact Alan Schaefer. He's a great guy. He'll hook you up with the best folks. There's great documentation on the website. And I really would encourage you to check out the developer forums. I know I find it very helpful when I'm doing Mac development. And we have some really awesome sessions coming up this week.

First of all, you want to go to the integrating with GameCenter session because that will go into really deep dive on scores and achievements and exactly how to hook into challenges. Because there's great things you can do with challenges that don't come for free, but they're so cool.

Next, check out the What's New in iTunes Connect because that's how your game is defined, right? That's where your game groups are defined. It's where you set up your Game Center enabling. And there's some new stuff there. And, you know, it's kind of tricky. Multiplayer gaming with Game Center on Thursday, great thing to take advantage of if you have a multiplayer game or if you're thinking about adding multiplayer to your existing game.

There's a lot of new stuff there that I didn't even get to talk about. And finally, if you're thinking about porting your iOS game to OS X or if you're an OS X developer and you just want to get a little bit more familiar with how it all works on Macs, definitely check out the Building Game Center games for OS X.