Happy new year everyone!

In preparations for releasing Escape from the Universe on iOS, I have implemented a number of new “services” on iOS. They allow to integrate your games easily with various iOS frameworks.

The detailed information how to activate all these integrations is here, you just add a 1 line to your CastleEngineManifest.xml and then use a trivial Pascal routines/classes for everything.

• Send analytics to Google Analytics or Game Analytics. Both are excellent and free analytics platforms for mobile games. You can gather a lot of data about how people are installing and playing your game. They both provide a number of statistics out-of-the-box, and in addition you can send a number of custom events (clicks, level progress, timings etc.), and in addition the in-app-purchases are automatically logged (so you can see when and who purchases things). Oh, and the Pascal API to handle it is trivial, and works also on Android: use TAnalytics in CastleAnalytics unit.

• Basic integration with Facebook SDK. This provides yet another analytics, this time integrated with a Facebook application. It can also be used to login to Facebook within your game. More integration with Facebook may be implemented on top of this in the future.

• You can open URLs on iOS. You can share text on iOS. You can open the AppStore page of a particular game (e.g. to ask user to rate your game). All of this with a cross-platform trivial Pascal API.

• Remember that we also have Apple Game Center (achievements, savegames in the cloud) and in-app purchases available on iOS, see iOS services docs.

Have fun with Castle Game Engine in 2018 ! 🙂 And if you had not seen it yet, take a look at our plans for 2018 – it starts now.