Filter
-
Content Type
-
Category
Mobile/Wearable
Visual Display
Digital Appliance
Platform
Recommendations
Filter
Develop Smart TV
docsamsung checkout dpi portal overview the samsung checkout dpi digital product inventory portal https //dpi samsungcheckout com/ is a web service portal designed for the samsung smart tv partners, which samsung helps them sell products and items through smart tv apps from the dpi, partners can register and manage products for sale and access the transaction history logs and sales reports for the applications they own dpi main services product management standard in-app products, subscriptions, paid apps order management purchase history for each user sales reports and financial reports coupon management creation and issuance service initiation process an account for the samsung apps tv seller office is required to use the dpi service once registered, partners can use the dpi service ※ dpi mini guide helps to grasp the overall workflow of samsung checkout service and dpi site - mini guide download step 1 accessing samsung checkout - login create a samsung account register your app in seller office and login to the dpi ① create a samsung account ② register your app in seller office ③ login to the checkout dpi portal noticeat first, only 'manager' in seller office can access dpi portal manager can manage entire menu in dpi portal manager can give permission to 'members' through membership management ※ members cannot access main screen before being given permission by a manager step 2 create group and give permissions only managers can access the member menu and manage groups ① member menu managers can manage and give menu permissions to members this can be done through the membership management and the group management menus ② group management > click create group go to create group menu and configure a group you can click operation, finance, cs or developer buttons to show preset menu permissions these preset menu permissions are for guidance only and can be edited ③ view group management list now you can manage members go to ‘membership management > edit permissions’ menu ④ membership management > edit permissions managers can manage and give menu permissions to members this can be done through the membership management and the group management menus ⑤ select member and group go to create group menu and configure a group you can click operation, finance, cs or developer buttons to show preset menu permissions these preset menu permissions are for guidance only and can be edited ⑥ confirm permissions now you can manage members go to ‘membership management > edit permissions’ menu step 3 issuance of dpi security key the dpi security key must be issued to safely use the service the issued key can be viewed under 'settings > app details setting' the key is a security key to use api calls, and this is a protection mechanism for invalid access from/to the app and dpi the related process is described in the section generating check values importantthe issued security key is a key to be used for open api calls made by a smart tv app please be careful not to reveal this key to others test buyers you can enroll test buyer in settings > test buyer menu checkout does not provide dummy pay anymore therefore, if you’d like to do payment test, please enroll test buyer ① input the test buyer’s samsung account id click [check samsung account registration] and please check the samsung account is available ② input the test buyer’s name ③ contact is not required information after filling in all the required information, click [register] button noticebefore launching your app on tv, only test buyers are allowed to proceed with the payment test importantafter releasing your app on tv, everyone is free to proceed with the payment test ※ after the test, you must manually process the refund it does not provide an automatic refund function product products can be registered for different countries through the add a new product menu configure product ① go to ‘product > add a new product’ menu ② this is where a new product is registered ③ enter product information product id, description, product type, visibility, expiration ④ please note that when you check visibility, the product will become visible from the app product type the following table explains the details of "product type" product type description consumable consumers can purchase this type of product anytime purchase history can be retrieved for 90 days non-consumable consumers can purchase this type of product only once purchase history can be retrieved with no time restriction limited period once this type of product is purchased, repurchase cannot be made during the time when the product effect set by cp lasts purchase history can be retrieved for 90 days if “limited period” product type is chosen, the duration of time for the product effect to last can be entered in the units above minute the duration time for the product effect to last is allowed for the maximum of 90 days subscription dpi system processes automatic payment on a certain designated cycle paid app for paid apps, when you register your app on dpi system you need to select it as paid app dynamic product in case that pater and samsung agree on that products and prices will be managed by cms of partner not samsung’s dpi, partner should select “dynamic product” as a product type even though all the information of actual products are on cms, partner need to register a representative item on dpi once so that our system can display information on samsung smart tv app/game store which is legally required and verify which server we need to call for certain products cms or dpi if dynamic product is chosen, partner does not register each products on dpi that partner sells in their app actuallypartner builds and operates its own cms to manage products information including prices and to verify purchase requestsadditional requirementsverification/no verification ‘verification’ is a recommended option otherwise partner has to handle the verification process by themselves and take all the responsibility for all the error cases related to verification process if ‘verification’ is selected, ‘verify uri’ is also required this uri should serve the function of checking product information such as product itself, price and currencyprice settingprice range information of products that you actually sells in your app is required by country/location it is not used for actual payment for providing the app information on samsung smart tv app/game store which is legally required thus, it has to be updated when the price range of your products is changed subscription it is necessary to make a subscription group before creating subscription item add new subscription group ① go to ‘product > subscription group > add a new group’ menu ② this is where a new subscription group is registered ③ enter subscription group name setting free trial offering ① free trial is able to set per “product group” id ② partner defines whether a free days offer whether it should be offered once per account/device or both notice [free trial offering option] per account only once if a user use a free trial offer with the "a" account once, free experience will be expired, and additional free experience is not possible with the "a" account however, if a cp does not check “ per device only once ”, a user can experience it free of charge when creating a new account with no subscription history per device only once if a user use one free trial offer on "a" device, a user cannot use free experience even if you change your account and create a new "b" account on a device both- per account only once provide free trial offer both based on “ a ” account and “ a ” device case 1 with the “ b ” account that does not have a subscription history, free experience is not available when you first sign up for the “ a ” device case 2 with “ a ” account, which has a history of cancellation after subscription, “ b ” device subscription is not allowed for free configure subscription ① go to ‘product > add a new product’ menu ② select subscription in the product type ③ enter product information product id, description ④ choose billing period, produce level, subscription group ⑤ if you’d like to make free trial subscription, please input the free trial period ⑥ check the duplicate benefit, visibility, expiration subscription plan checkout supports upgrade, downgrade, cross-downgrade subscription plan create a subscription group to set the subscription level in the same group, consumers can upgrade and downgrade freely cross-downgrade api is currently possible, checkout does not provide cross-upgrade api importantif you’d like to use the cross-upgrade function, please use a combination of upgrade api and cross grade api please refer to the details on the sdf site in the near future, we will provide the guide on the sdf site field description the following table explains the details of input fields input field description product name representative product name the name of the product used in the representative country/location must be entered in the country/location product name field this field cannot be left empty product id alphanumeric and two special characters '-', '_' are allowed maximum 20 bytes product description describe the product type following product types are allowed;consumable, non-consumable, limited period, paid app, subscription, dynamic product period if the product type is ‘limited period’, a number fewer than 129,600 in minutes is allowed maximum 90 days billing period if the product type is "subscription" , "weekly","monthly","annualy" is allowed subscription group it is necessary to make a subscription group before creating subscription item free trial period if the product type is "subscription", a number in days is allowed visibility a field indicating whether the product can be shown "show" , "hide" and "optional" is allowed duplication benefit the condition defines whether a free days offer whether it should be offered once per account/device or both expiration if the product type is "subscription" , "not applicable" ,"1 month", "6 month", "1 year" is allowed country/location product name the country/location and product name are separated by ' ' and a maximum of 50 bytes of product name is allowed if more than one country/location is entered, use ' country/location product price the country/location and price information are separated by ' ', and if more than one country/location is input, the use of the ' transaction policy the dpi provides information on the status for the products purchased by users through request purchases list api in case the purchased product is not applied on the real game, the status can be checked on the “product applied status” in case the purchased product was refunded to the user, the status can be checked on the “sales cancellation status” the period of time the above status information is provided through api to the application can be classified by the product type as shown below product type applied purchases purchase history not applied purchases refund/cancellation consumable application date + 90days all products can be viewed with no restrictions in time period refund date+ 90 days subscription subscription expiry date subsendtime + 90days subscription expiry date subsendtime + 90 days subscription expiry date subsendtime + 90 days glossaries term description billing / payment service a service created in order to help monetary transactions between service providers and users partner / app developer be in charge of creating products suitable for consumers of the smart tv paid app a service or app that can be only downloaded after making a payment in-app purchase a method to pay for additional products and features within both free apps and paid apps paypal paypal the global payments company headquartered in the united states that provide the payment service via pre-registered payment method digital product inventory dpi a system provided to developers to enter and manage extra products and items in their own apps it is directly connected to the app store samsung checkout billing client a payment ui module for consumers to add their choice of payment methods and pay for premium apps or special items operating zone/ staging zone operating zone is a live environment where the real users get access to verification system is a test environment where 3rd party development and qa are conducted sandbox zone is regarded as staging zone operating tv / development tv - operating tv tv purchased from on/off-line, tv with the same setting environment as the one in general users - development tv tv that is made in use of a board separately provided by samsung electronics, tv that allows a setting environment for development different from the one for general users cms content management system product catalogue management server or system including price information in this document, this word refers to the server for the type “dynamic product” that has all the information of products and handles verification with its own product catalogue for reference, product information of other product types should be managed in dpi not 3rd party cms dpi will be looking at cms to pull necessary product information as needed cms will be the source of truth regarding content metadata, purchase history which user bought which title at which resolution of purchase/rental, etc whereas dpi will be the source of truth of transactional data i e transaction amount, tax amount both systems will be linked by "invoice id" that is generated by dpi and passed over to cms for every successful transaction ※ dpi user guide full version provides detailed desciptions and examples of new dpi site functions/usages - full guide download
Develop Smart TV
docsamsung checkout dpi portal overview the samsung checkout dpi digital product inventory portal https //dpi samsungcheckout com/ is a web service portal designed for the samsung smart tv partners, which samsung helps them sell products and items through smart tv apps from the dpi, partners can register and manage products for sale and access the transaction history logs and sales reports for the applications they own dpi main services product management standard in-app products, subscriptions, paid apps order management purchase history for each user sales reports and financial reports coupon management creation and issuance service initiation process an account for the samsung apps tv seller office is required to use the dpi service once registered, partners can use the dpi service ※ dpi mini guide helps to grasp the overall workflow of samsung checkout service and dpi site - mini guide download step 1 accessing samsung checkout - login create a samsung account register your app in seller office and login to the dpi ① create a samsung account ② register your app in seller office ③ login to the checkout dpi portal noticeat first, only 'manager' in seller office can access dpi portal manager can manage entire menu in dpi portal manager can give permission to 'members' through membership management ※ members cannot access main screen before being given permission by a manager step 2 create group and give permissions only managers can access the member menu and manage groups ① member menu managers can manage and give menu permissions to members this can be done through the membership management and the group management menus ② group management > click create group go to create group menu and configure a group you can click operation, finance, cs or developer buttons to show preset menu permissions these preset menu permissions are for guidance only and can be edited ③ view group management list now you can manage members go to ‘membership management > edit permissions’ menu ④ membership management > edit permissions managers can manage and give menu permissions to members this can be done through the membership management and the group management menus ⑤ select member and group go to create group menu and configure a group you can click operation, finance, cs or developer buttons to show preset menu permissions these preset menu permissions are for guidance only and can be edited ⑥ confirm permissions now you can manage members go to ‘membership management > edit permissions’ menu step 3 issuance of dpi security key the dpi security key must be issued to safely use the service the issued key can be viewed under 'settings > app details setting' the key is a security key to use api calls, and this is a protection mechanism for invalid access from/to the app and dpi the related process is described in the section generating check values importantthe issued security key is a key to be used for open api calls made by a smart tv app please be careful not to reveal this key to others test buyers you can enroll test buyer in settings > test buyer menu checkout does not provide dummy pay anymore therefore, if you’d like to do payment test, please enroll test buyer ① input the test buyer’s samsung account id click [check samsung account registration] and please check the samsung account is available ② input the test buyer’s name ③ contact is not required information after filling in all the required information, click [register] button noticebefore launching your app on tv, only test buyers are allowed to proceed with the payment test importantafter releasing your app on tv, everyone is free to proceed with the payment test ※ after the test, you must manually process the refund it does not provide an automatic refund function product products can be registered for different countries through the add a new product menu configure product ① go to ‘product > add a new product’ menu ② this is where a new product is registered ③ enter product information product id, description, product type, visibility, expiration ④ please note that when you check visibility, the product will become visible from the app product type the following table explains the details of "product type" product type description consumable consumers can purchase this type of product anytime purchase history can be retrieved for 90 days non-consumable consumers can purchase this type of product only once purchase history can be retrieved with no time restriction limited period once this type of product is purchased, repurchase cannot be made during the time when the product effect set by cp lasts purchase history can be retrieved for 90 days if “limited period” product type is chosen, the duration of time for the product effect to last can be entered in the units above minute the duration time for the product effect to last is allowed for the maximum of 90 days subscription dpi system processes automatic payment on a certain designated cycle paid app for paid apps, when you register your app on dpi system you need to select it as paid app dynamic product in case that pater and samsung agree on that products and prices will be managed by cms of partner not samsung’s dpi, partner should select “dynamic product” as a product type even though all the information of actual products are on cms, partner need to register a representative item on dpi once so that our system can display information on samsung smart tv app/game store which is legally required and verify which server we need to call for certain products cms or dpi if dynamic product is chosen, partner does not register each products on dpi that partner sells in their app actuallypartner builds and operates its own cms to manage products information including prices and to verify purchase requestsadditional requirementsverification/no verification ‘verification’ is a recommended option otherwise partner has to handle the verification process by themselves and take all the responsibility for all the error cases related to verification process if ‘verification’ is selected, ‘verify uri’ is also required this uri should serve the function of checking product information such as product itself, price and currencyprice settingprice range information of products that you actually sells in your app is required by country/location it is not used for actual payment for providing the app information on samsung smart tv app/game store which is legally required thus, it has to be updated when the price range of your products is changed subscription it is necessary to make a subscription group before creating subscription item add new subscription group ① go to ‘product > subscription group > add a new group’ menu ② this is where a new subscription group is registered ③ enter subscription group name setting free trial offering ① free trial is able to set per “product group” id ② partner defines whether a free days offer whether it should be offered once per account/device or both notice [free trial offering option] per account only once if a user use a free trial offer with the "a" account once, free experience will be expired, and additional free experience is not possible with the "a" account however, if a cp does not check “ per device only once ”, a user can experience it free of charge when creating a new account with no subscription history per device only once if a user use one free trial offer on "a" device, a user cannot use free experience even if you change your account and create a new "b" account on a device both- per account only once provide free trial offer both based on “ a ” account and “ a ” device case 1 with the “ b ” account that does not have a subscription history, free experience is not available when you first sign up for the “ a ” device case 2 with “ a ” account, which has a history of cancellation after subscription, “ b ” device subscription is not allowed for free configure subscription ① go to ‘product > add a new product’ menu ② select subscription in the product type ③ enter product information product id, description ④ choose billing period, produce level, subscription group ⑤ if you’d like to make free trial subscription, please input the free trial period ⑥ check the duplicate benefit, visibility, expiration subscription plan checkout supports upgrade, downgrade, cross-downgrade subscription plan create a subscription group to set the subscription level in the same group, consumers can upgrade and downgrade freely cross-downgrade api is currently possible, checkout does not provide cross-upgrade api importantif you’d like to use the cross-upgrade function, please use a combination of upgrade api and cross grade api please refer to the details on the sdf site in the near future, we will provide the guide on the sdf site field description the following table explains the details of input fields input field description product name representative product name the name of the product used in the representative country/location must be entered in the country/location product name field this field cannot be left empty product id alphanumeric and two special characters '-', '_' are allowed maximum 20 bytes product description describe the product type following product types are allowed;consumable, non-consumable, limited period, paid app, subscription, dynamic product period if the product type is ‘limited period’, a number fewer than 129,600 in minutes is allowed maximum 90 days billing period if the product type is "subscription" , "weekly","monthly","annualy" is allowed subscription group it is necessary to make a subscription group before creating subscription item free trial period if the product type is "subscription", a number in days is allowed visibility a field indicating whether the product can be shown "show" , "hide" and "optional" is allowed duplication benefit the condition defines whether a free days offer whether it should be offered once per account/device or both expiration if the product type is "subscription" , "not applicable" ,"1 month", "6 month", "1 year" is allowed country/location product name the country/location and product name are separated by ' ' and a maximum of 50 bytes of product name is allowed if more than one country/location is entered, use ' country/location product price the country/location and price information are separated by ' ', and if more than one country/location is input, the use of the ' transaction policy the dpi provides information on the status for the products purchased by users through request purchases list api in case the purchased product is not applied on the real game, the status can be checked on the “product applied status” in case the purchased product was refunded to the user, the status can be checked on the “sales cancellation status” the period of time the above status information is provided through api to the application can be classified by the product type as shown below product type applied purchases purchase history not applied purchases refund/cancellation consumable application date + 90days all products can be viewed with no restrictions in time period refund date+ 90 days subscription subscription expiry date subsendtime + 90days subscription expiry date subsendtime + 90 days subscription expiry date subsendtime + 90 days glossaries term description billing / payment service a service created in order to help monetary transactions between service providers and users partner / app developer be in charge of creating products suitable for consumers of the smart tv paid app a service or app that can be only downloaded after making a payment in-app purchase a method to pay for additional products and features within both free apps and paid apps paypal paypal the global payments company headquartered in the united states that provide the payment service via pre-registered payment method digital product inventory dpi a system provided to developers to enter and manage extra products and items in their own apps it is directly connected to the app store samsung checkout billing client a payment ui module for consumers to add their choice of payment methods and pay for premium apps or special items operating zone/ staging zone operating zone is a live environment where the real users get access to verification system is a test environment where 3rd party development and qa are conducted sandbox zone is regarded as staging zone operating tv / development tv - operating tv tv purchased from on/off-line, tv with the same setting environment as the one in general users - development tv tv that is made in use of a board separately provided by samsung electronics, tv that allows a setting environment for development different from the one for general users cms content management system product catalogue management server or system including price information in this document, this word refers to the server for the type “dynamic product” that has all the information of products and handles verification with its own product catalogue for reference, product information of other product types should be managed in dpi not 3rd party cms dpi will be looking at cms to pull necessary product information as needed cms will be the source of truth regarding content metadata, purchase history which user bought which title at which resolution of purchase/rental, etc whereas dpi will be the source of truth of transactional data i e transaction amount, tax amount both systems will be linked by "invoice id" that is generated by dpi and passed over to cms for every successful transaction ※ dpi user guide full version provides detailed desciptions and examples of new dpi site functions/usages - full guide download
featured mobile
blogmeet maria ly, co-founder & ceo of wellness app skimble (maker of workout trainer for samsung). to celebrate international women’s day, we interviewed this top female developer and entrepreneur. she shared her journey to become a leader in a male-dominated industry and her passion for supporting women in tech. read on for some great tips on how you can help women make big moves in the tech industry. how did you get your start in the tech industry? growing up in canada, i was part of kidsareit, a tech-focused program founded by vicki saunders (who now heads up sheeo). i stayed in touch with this group to help foster the youth entrepreneurial culture in canada and even had a mobile-modification business with a few high school friends. i chose to take all the tech and programming classes available at my high school, which continued to spark my joy in tech. eventually, i went on to study computer engineering at the university of waterloo. during my studies, i had 6 different co-op internships around the world, which exposed me to different tech verticals (cad software, aerospace, automotive, hvac, semiconductors, etc.) and some wonderful bosses/mentors. all these early life experiences helped solidify the idea that i could have fun doing meaningful work within the tech industry, and i'm forever grateful. what inspired you to start skimble and what makes workout trainer different from other fitness apps? as a youngster, i dabbled in figure skating and gymnastics, got the chance to represent canada at the world cheerleading championships, and more. then i fell in love with rock climbing. i was all about living an active life and dreamed of the day i could combine tech and fitness in a creative way. with the advent of the smartphone, skimble came to life. our flagship app, workout trainer, was among the first multimedia-focused workout apps on the market, offering the largest open exercise databases for community members and trainers. that means you can quickly find a workout that meets your needs or simply create a specific workout of your choosing, complete with your own media. we also showcase a ton of real-life and celebrity trainers on a regular basis so you can follow these folks to help keep you motivated. what major hurdles did you face when developing skimble? we've been bootstrapped and self-funded since day one. when we got into the rock health accelerator program, we received a grant to build out our app. in those early days, my co-founder and i did most of the heavy lifting. i went through a ui/ux bootcamp course to help us design our initial user experience and ran about 30 of our first photoshoots. this was a great experience because we got immediate feedback from our community and were able to collaborate first-hand with so many amazing personal trainers. how has samsung supported skimble and the developing process? samsung provides developers with a range of developer tools as well as stellar developer-focused learning/networking events like the samsung developer conference. as part of the made for samsung app suite, we've had the opportunity to work closely with in-house developers on select partner projects, too. we were also stoked to receive the 2021 best wellness app award. what are some unique challenges you’ve faced as a woman in the tech industry and how did you overcome them? many moons ago, there were only a handful of women computer engineering/science grads coming out of most universities. there were plenty of skeptics in a predominantly male-centric world and i have my (un)fair share of stories. you may be aware of an unconscious bias where men are judged by their potential and women are judged by their past performance. women are additionally judged on their friendliness and morality. despite all this, there was still this resounding sense of can-do in the air and it did not stop our early crew of tech ladies from being the change we wanted to see. as i started skimble, i felt in many ways less pressure to fit a certain mold. we were creating our own company culture, which was pretty liberating! how has the tech industry changed to encourage more females to pursue a career in tech? one thing is that there's more transparency in recruiting/hiring including how much pay an average person in a certain role should receive. this kind of info wasn't available in the past. now, it's openly available and informs us of the gender pay gap, especially at the higher levels. that kind of information can be used by women to negotiate. anita borg suggests some companies that are pro-women in the workforce. why is it important to encourage other women in tech? in the tech industry, less than 30% of the jobs are held by women. broadly speaking, most technology is for everyone. it makes perfect sense that women should be right there at the forefront. visibility also matters. girls and boys need to see tech leaders of all genders, ethnicities, shapes, and sizes. this way, we can create the most inclusive solutions for the near and far future. what advice do you have for young women who are interested in a career in tech? go for it! more than ever before, women are breaking barriers, having their voices heard, gaining the support of their male counterparts, and narrowing the pay/position gaps. i would further encourage parents of young children to expose them equally to different career options. have them participate in a stem program over the summer. teach them how to type and code. you know the hashtag #tymed (teaching young minds every day)? we need to start educating them early so when they look around and ask themselves, “where is the inspiration?”, it will hopefully be all around us. what are your favorite resources or organizations that support women in tech? nowadays, i have been investing alongside some incredible women. one in five angel investors are women! on the early/angel stage side, i've had the opportunity to invest with tess hau of tess ventures. on the later stage/pre-ipo side, i've invested with kristin mcdonnell of menlo group. i'm lucky to able to advise women-led companies and collab on side projects with women. this is to say that if you can, let's pay it forward in women-centric investing and mentorship. let's help each other chase down our biggest dreams. moreover, i have always had respect for my alma mater, the university of waterloo. and i can’t forget to give a shout out to all the greater toronto area entrepreneurial tech communities. many of these groups didn’t exist in the early 2000s. thanks to maria ly for sharing her experiences in tech and helpful advice on supporting the next generation of women in tech. be sure to follow us on @samsung_dev to keep up-to-date on the latest developer news. keep an eye on our blog for some helpful resources on how you can support women in tech, and make sure to sign up for the samsung developer program to take advantage of exclusive benefits and access helpful developer resources.
success story design, galaxy watch, marketplace
blogthis year at sdc18 the first-ever best of 2018 samsung galaxy apps awards winners were announced! the awards recognize the top publishers who have stood out amongst the galaxy apps store’s boutique of expertly curated apps. to kick-off our ‘best of 2018’ series, we spoke with zhu guangxu, this year’s winner for best themes designer to get some insights on how he creates themes that stand out from the crowd. how did you get into designing themes? i graduated from college with a major in electrical engineering, but during my sophomore year, i inadvertently came across theme stores. out of curiosity, i did some research on themes, and taught myself how to make them. i created some themes which made it to the online store. many people liked them, and that’s when i realized creating themes could be more than a hobby. how would you describe your approach to design? a good theme takes time to create and perfect before it is ready to be used on a smartphone. my inspiration comes from the world around me, examining every little detail, which is far more complicated than a theme. that is the soul and essence of designers. what is your process for designing themes? i start with the wallpaper, and base the logos on that design to match the colours, paying close attention to the details. what is the most important thing to consider when designing themes? when it comes to theme design, the user’s first impression is everything. overall style and general likability of a theme are the main things i consider during theme design. watch zhu guangxu’s acceptance speech for the best of 2018 theme designer award. what is the biggest technical challenge you faced as a themes designer? when designing themes, i would start off by trying to create the best design possible, and then would often would run into technical issues with the smartphone operating systems. however, thanks to a strong team, i was able to work around those issues to still create the quality theme designs i had in mind. what design element do you think all good themes have in common? themes come in all kinds of styles, from super cool, to classic minimalist, to purely beautiful. because themes are so diverse, it’s hard to pinpoint a specific design element that makes them stand out. but no matter the theme style, you can always tell when a lot of work has gone into creating the wallpaper and logos, a trademark of a quality theme. how do you keep your theme designs fresh and relevant? i pay close attention to the smartphone industry, specifically market trends and consumer insights. i’ll often create and design interfaces based on what consumers are currently excited about. what advice do you have for designers who are starting out to have a successful themes business? keep working on new themes and promoting high quality free themes. this will help you build a loyal following who will be looking out for your next designs. how has samsung helped your business? i became a samsung designer about six months ago and it’s been a great resource in my themes development. working with samsung gives me access to monthly reports that help me get a sense of what themes are popular with consumers, to help inform my future designs. so far things are going well, and i look forward to more ways to collaborate with samsung in the future. thanks to zhu guangxu for sharing his advice on theme design. be sure to follow us on @samsung_dev for more interviews with the best of 2018 winners coming out in the next couple of weeks. for now, you can find out more about the program in our samsung best of 2018 winners announced post.
Zhu Guangxu
announcement mobile
blogthe galaxy store developer api has launched! providing programmatic access to key functions of seller portal, the galaxy store developer api lets you manage your apps and in-app items or check app performance, without having to use the seller portal ui. the galaxy store developer api contains a set of server-to-server apis which provides access to different areas of seller portal: content publish api: view, modify, submit, and change the status of apps registered in galaxy store seller portal iap publish api: view, register, modify, and remove samsung in-app purchase (iap) items gss (galaxy store statistics) api: view statistics about apps registered in galaxy store content publish api use the content publish api to manage your apps registered in seller portal to: view a list of all of your registered apps view information about a single registered app, such as the title, status, description, binary information, and more modify app information, including images, icons, and binaries submit an app for review (an app must be reviewed before being offered for sale in galaxy store) change the status of a registered app to for_sale, suspended, or terminated upload files required when submitting or updating an app see content publish api for more information. iap publish api use the iap publish api to manage your in-app items of your registered apps in seller portal to: view information about in-app items for all of your registered apps view in-app item information for a single registered app, such as the title, status, description, price, and more register an in-app item modify an in-app item remove an in-app item see iap publish api for more information. gss api use the gss api to view statistics about your registered apps in seller portal to: view statistics for all of your registered apps, such as new downloads, downloads by devices, sales, and item sales view statistics about a single registered app, such as new downloads, sales, item purchases, average rating, ratings volume, item sales, item buyers, new item buyers, and arppu (average revenue per paying user) see gss metric api for more information about viewing statistics. get started are you ready to start using the galaxy store developer api? learn more about its requirements by going to the seller portal notice or galaxy store developer api. each api also includes examples showing usage and expected results.
events mobile, game
blogin april, samsung galaxy gamedev went to croatia for reboot develop blue. we sent two technical staff and an account manager for a whole host of activities, and i’ll admit that we looked at the event (which is new to us) as a rather speculative attempt to connect with game developers. after all, reboot previously had no technical track and has only been running for a handful of years; maybe it would turn out to be a non-event. but reboot managed to exceed all our expectations. we had approximately 60 seriously-interesting and highly-competent game developers in our sessions. alon or bach, who heads our vulkan standards effort, did a great job in a talk on advanced vulkan programming techniques, which are used in croteam’s serious engine for mobile. alon then went on to host a panel discussion on the merits of vulkan. this panel featured some lively and informative input from karlo jež from croteam, christian forfang from arm, and graham wihlidal from ea’s seed group. quiz time! watch the above video of alon presenting at reboot, then answer the following multiple-choice questions (scroll to the end of the blog the answers). 1. what is the most significant performance gain you can reasonably expect to see when you completely fix some badly-chosen pipeline barriers in a trivial vulkan app? a. 25% b. 50% c. 100% d. nothing, there’s no such thing as a badly-chosen pipeline barrier. 2. in general, what’s the preferred draw order for opaque geometry in vulkan? a. left to right b. right to left c. top to bottom d. bottom to top e. front to back f. back to front g. some other order that isn’t listed here. 3. in terms of texture formats, why is a “tiled” buffer generally preferred to a “linear” buffer? a. samsung’s tiling architectures store tiled buffers on chip. b. reducing power consumption is more important for mobile devices than protecting bandwidth. c. there’s a bug in the driver. d. ha! it’s a trick question! tiling isn’t preferred. e. texture fetches cooperate better with the cache that way. 4. to make sure you were paying attention -- and for two special bonus points -- what animal did alon reference in his talk, and why? on the account management side, david pither spent most of his meal and coffee breaks over the three days having enlightening conversations with both developers and publishers who might benefit from collaborating with samsung’s galaxy gamedev group. it was business networking at its best, and we came back with a long list of action items which has kept david busy for weeks. david also set up conversations with folks that we regularly work with like sega, croteam, and ea. it’s always good to keep in touch with the big boys of gaming. we now know more about their technology and publishing roadmaps, which means we now know more about how we can help. my trip home was a bit of a disappointment. getting home roughly 15 hours late isn’t high on my list of “fun ways to start a holiday,” but it certainly won’t stop me (and more importantly) samsung from going back next year. in fact, my enthusiasm levels for the reboot events are so high that we plan to attend the reboot develop red event in banff in october. and of course, we’ll be back in croatia next spring. hopefully, we’ll see you there as well! reboot blue, and reboot red – they’re both firmly in our calendar from here on. soon we’re going reboot purple. we’re adding a lot more technical info over the coming months, so make sure you revisit the blog soon to learn more about vulkan. in the meantime, to keep you going: a gentle intro: vulkan-tutorial.com/introduction a set of beginner's guides: khronos.org/blog/beginners-guide-to-vulkan getting in deep: khronos.org/developers/library/2019-vulkanised-is-back (.pdf format) youtube.com/user/khronosgroup (videos) jet set vulkan : reflecting on the move to vulkan quiz answers 1: c 2: e 3: e 4: a hedgehog – because alon’s fellow speaker’s name is “karlo jež” and jež is croatian for hedgehog!
Richard Huddy
success story uiux, design, mobile, marketplace
blogrecognized for “best creative app” in our best of galaxy store awards 2019 is concepts by tophatch. tophatch empowers creative people with design tools that simplify the creative process with smarter, more intuitive technology. david brittain, co-founder and ceo of tophatch, shares how concepts got started, what it takes to maintain your app’s performance, and tips on how indie designers can establish a successful app development business. tell us about concepts. concepts is an infinite creative workspace for visual thinkers, designers and illustrators. concepts is used by designers at companies like unity, illumination entertainment, hp, and disney globally to create and share everything from visual notes and storyboards to architectural layouts and product designs., we built concepts from the ground up for touch and stylus-based devices. when tablets first began to come out, we saw other apps were transplanting awkward desktop mechanics to mobile interfaces instead of writing for the new ecosystem. we saw that design on a mobile platform could be a lot more intuitive and fun and knew that much more was possible. we've been working on our vision for 7 years now, and our software, stylus, and device performance are so fluid that our designers prefer concepts over paper. how is the app used? concepts is a powerful creative tool that allows you to explore and communicate ideas with a quick, natural workflow. the app allows you to sketch, edit, and communicate your ideas with liquid, vector-based brushes, and precision tools. the infinite canvas lets you flow with your ideas as far as they’ll go, with fluid pens and brushes that come in designer copic colors. the app's customizable layout, easy-to-use layers, drag+drop imports, and precision grids help you sketch and design effortlessly. everything you draw is an editable vector that can be updated and moved around the canvas, saving you valuable work time.. concepts is used by creative professionals for note taking, mind mapping, drawing, storyboarding, graphic design, product iteration, interior design and architectural planning. what is concepts' development methodology? our development methodology is highly iterative. we take each feature through a complete design cycle. we focus on building one feature at a time, iterate until it’s clean and well developed, then ship a beta as quickly as we can to hear from our users. they are a fantastic group who give us insightful feedback, which we incorporate before releasing the final product. this means we're delivering releases every week on one platform or another. tell us about the tophatch team behind concepts. our company has been distributed globally from the very start - often called remote, but it works well for us. ben and i started the company and worked together on concepts for a year before meeting in-person. we embrace the benefits of a distributed team and avoid the downsides where we can. that means trusting each team member to get their work done and embracing asynchronous workflows. people in the team work the hours and days that work best for them and plan and schedule their work to minimize blocking dependencies on other people. was concepts designed for mobile phones or tablets? is there a difference? concepts is designed for tablet and stylus first, as the larger screen gives users the most space to sketch and think. when we brought it to android, we were likely the first major app built for chrome os first - it has a large screen, stylus, and resizable windows we wanted to make sure we supported well. we then made it work for phones, although our design did account for this up-front. it’s a challenge to offer the same tools and functionality on really small screens. ultimately, we have to bias our decisions to the devices our paying users care about the most, which are the ones that give them the most space to work. what’s your approach to user experience and design principles in app development? our general philosophy is that a good design interface allows creators to focus on what they want to get done. concepts is a creative app that helps you to work efficiently, so tools are simple, customizable, and only where you need them. if you forget you're using the app as you're "in the zone”, then we have achieved our goal. in concrete terms, this means minimizing the steps in a workflow, avoiding pop-ups and notifications that block progress, and allowing the user to customize layout and tools so the features they need are close at hand (or tap). another key principle for us is taking a humble position - we don't assume we have the right answers. we listen closely to what our customers want, we prototype features, get feedback, and then adapt. sometimes this is painful as it means starting again from scratch on a feature we've put weeks of effort into, but in the long run, it's the right choice. how have you maintained your app’s performance since launch? we focus on the long-term success and health of concepts. we are constantly looking at all aspects of the app's performance. how are we doing with downloads? how well do users convert to becoming paying users? how much time do they spend using the app? we then have to pick an area of focus and look at how to improve that area. roughly speaking, we tend to spend 3-6 months focusing on one area at a time, as we have found this level of commitment is needed to get results. it's often hard to move the needle unless you commit to a few cycles of changes - this way you can measure what you try, see the results, and adapt your approach. what advice do you have for indie developers and designers attempting to develop a successful app business? focus. that's the biggest competitive advantage you have. find your niche that the big companies are not paying attention to. build something amazing that is loved by your group of customers. and if your business model requires you making money, make sure you are asking for money from those customers from the very beginning. it's a very clear metric as to whether you are building something that meets a customer's needs. once you have conquered the niche, expand from there. what is next for concepts? our big focus over the coming months is cross-platform workflows. our goal is to make it easy to share and collaborate on content across android, windows, and ios. how has samsung helped your business? the number one way samsung helps is by producing so many amazing products that support a stylus. nine out of the top ten devices that use concepts on android are made by samsung! a high performance tablet that supports palm rejection and a stylus with pressure and tilt response is key to concepts being a great experience. with the best of galaxy store awards 2020 selections approaching mid-year, what tips do you have to stand out from the crowd? it's probably not what they want to hear, but i'd recommend not focusing on awards. focus on making your customers happy :) . we want to thank david for talking with us about tophatch’s award winning design tools, how concepts was developed and the importance of monitoring app performance and tips for indie developers interested in building a successful app business. if you’re on a samsung galaxy device, you can check out their app. follow us on twitter at @samsung_dev for more developer interviews as well as tips for building games, apps, and more for the galaxy store. find out more about our best of galaxy store awards.
Samsung Developers
Learn Developers Podcast
docseason 1, episode 1 previous episode | episode index | next episode this is a transcript of one episode of the samsung developers podcast, hosted by and produced by tony morelan a listing of all podcast transcripts can be found here host tony morelan senior developer evangelist, samsung developers instagram - twitter - linkedin guest jong woo samsung game services in this episode of pow, i interview jong woo, vice president of games services for samsung electronics in the u s jong’s got a great story not just what he is doing here at samsung related to the gaming industry, but his time before arriving at samsung where he helped take a little game offered on facebook to become one of the successful mobile games of all time, candy crush saga listen download this episode topics covered building games for galaxy store revenue sharing and monetization driving engagement with samsung game launcher gaming culture, past and present helping businesses grow with samsung next android developers transcript note transcripts are provided by an automated service and reviewed by the samsung developers web team inaccuracies from the transcription process do occur, so please refer to the audio if you are in doubt about the transcript tony morelan 00 02 hey, i'm tony morelan and this is pow! podcast of wisdom from the samsung developer program, where we talk about the latest tech new trends and give insight into all of the opportunities available for developers looking to create for samsung on today's show, i interviewed jong woo, vice president of game services for samsung electronics in the us, jong's got a great story, not just what he's doing here at samsung related to the gaming industry, but his time before arriving at samsung, where he helped take a little game offered on facebook to become one of the most successful mobile games of all time, candy crush saga so i'm going to start off with a real basic question who is jong woo? jong woo 00 47 i'm one of those lucky guys i'd say that gets to do professionally what i'm also very passionate about, personally, and that's gaming i am an avid gamer i love playing games all sorts of games from board games to console and pc games so you know, i've actually had the opportunity to work in the gaming industry for the past 15 plus years or so so most recently, i headed up business development and partnerships for king digital entertainment and i was actually kings first us based hire and they moved me from new york to california, back in 2011 and at that time, king was a web-based sort of casual game developer and they were looking to make the pivot into social and eventually mobile so i opened up their san francisco office and helped that helped the company pivot through from the web based into facebook initially, and then into mobile and it was a pretty fun and crazy time getting to bring candy crush saga to market launch that game and be a part of that games, explosive growth tony morelan 02 04 how many years were you at king? jong woo 02 06 so i was at king for almost three years and after that three-year period, i moved to head up business development and marketing for a game publisher called machine zone and at that time, machine zone had just launched a game called game of war and, you know, i watched that game climb the top grossing charts very quickly and this was at a time when, you know, people and pundits in the industry, were saying that, you know, mobile gamers in the west like in the united states, they said they will never gravitate towards hardcore mmo rpg games, right? if you looked at the top grossing charts on mobile during that time, it was casual games and social casino games, predominantly, and you know, everyone once said that these were these hardcore genres of gaming they were for, you know, the asian markets like the korea, china and japan but he was game of war sort of, you know, at least proving the look like they were proving the pundits wrong and so i had an opportunity to meet with the ceo of machines zone, got to understand, you know, what the company was about and, you know, made the determination for myself that this wasn't necessarily an exception to the rule but this was sort of a trend, a sort of a trend that was happening in the mobile gaming space and so i made the move from king to machine zone and yeah, got to really see firsthand what live operations really means for those gaming as a service, right, this type of live operations that typically you would see for sort of pc large pc mmo rpg games you were starting to see that sort of live operations machine being replicated on mobile and driving tremendous value and so you know, that's sort of, i was able to sort of witness sort of both ends of sort of the mobile gaming genre spectrum from sort of casual puzzle games, to really hardcore, massively multiplayer synchronous rpg games tony morelan 04 24 so we understand that, after those years working for two very influential gaming companies, that you then got out of the gaming space and actually got into the charitable space jong woo 04 37 that's right the charitable project was sort of a passion project of mine and about around 2017 you know, i came to the realization that the mobile gaming landscape was changing, and not necessarily changing for the better, right? i think less than less people were organically going into the app stores right like, we don't go to the app store's just to go in and see what's new that week anymore right? that was a, a large, a very big phenomenon when, you know smart form smartphone adoption was still sort of, you know, hockey sticking, right? you got a new iphone or a new android device, and you wanted to go into the app stores and see what cool new apps were there but nowadays, you know, even when we upgrade our smartphones, we just back up and, and restore, right, and we're not going into these app stores anymore and we have sort of the seven or eight apps that we have just sort of so much integrated into our life, that we're not really looking to expand beyond those services or games, right and because of that, you know, you start to see discoverability die with regards to games you know, the viral hooks that helped games like candy crush saga scale massively they were being replaced by you know, some ad tech and this ad mobile advertising ecosystem and so in order for you to critically build a massive players, you needed a massive war chest of marketing funds, and the most successful games in mobile gaming were not necessarily the most innovative or even the most fun, right? they were the ones that had, you know, a marketing plan and a marketing budget to go and execute scale and so you got this weird split in the industry, you got hyper casual, which was sort of a genre that got introduced in the midst of sort of this landscape shift and so you're talking about low risk, low cost games really designed to retain users for minutes and not days or months anymore and you know, it was quick revenue you, you got somebody to play a game for 10 minutes, and in that 10 minutes, you showed them 20 ads, and then if they deleted your app, that's okay there was always another one waiting in the wings and then the other side of that spectrum, you got, you know, games that were getting super aggressive with monetization practices where, you know, free to play started to feel more like play, pay to win you know, and, you know, i can understand why these game publishers are adopting these more aggressive monetization practices, because they had to keep up with the rising costs of the marketing, you know, in order to sort of continue scaling and so that was the time when i decided maybe it was a time for a change for me and i left the gaming industry and started a charitable giving app and right around the time i was adopting this idea, fintech was booming there were companies and mobile applications trying to help people do everything related to their finances, right like from saving to investing, budgeting, like you got venmo and peer to peer payments, but i didn't see anyone really thinking about utilizing the fintech infrastructure and the tools to help people give back and you know, particularly for millennials, who are the most socially conscious generation right now, this was something that they have always said is super important to them right? when they think about what companies they want to work for, they think about sort of the social responsibility of these companies, right, they have causes that they care very passionate about and the disconnect that i saw in the marketplace was that charitable organizations had a hard time sort of marketing and soliciting funds from millennials because the truth be told, like the roi wasn't necessarily positive, right? it's much easier to continue hitting up the sort of the older generation, the 50 pluses who will attend your gallows and you know, right there sort of like annual giving checks to you, right so that's, that's the way tribal organizations are marketing and so those sort of this disconnect that i was hoping to bridge with, with this initiative, that i that i had started post machines tony morelan 09 03 so from there, though you then decide to get back into gaming that's right it's about that time that i understand someone from samsung then reached out to you to try and get you to come join join the folks over here is that correct? jong woo 09 17 that's right so like samsung had reached out probably, you know, five, six years ago, when i was still starting out at machines or, you know, they were, they've been looking to build out a gaming business pretty early on, i think and at that time, i had always told the hr recruiter person from samsung, no, i'm good, i'm good and most recently into that in early 2019 this person had reached back out to me right around the time of gdc, which is the game developers conference in san francisco, asking if i would meet him for a cup of coffee and so i went and met with him and he told me about what samsung was thinking about with regards to gaming and building a services business around gaming and so, you know, in, i agreed at that time to continue the discussion and this was sort of in now this landscape where, you know, games like fortnight had launched right, and fortnight was sort of this new the embodiment of this new genre of game, right, that wasn't monetizing from a pay to win standpoint anymore, right? like, there is nothing inside a game like fortnight that you can pay for that helps you play that game better, right? it was purely sort of cosmetics inside that game and then, you know, fortnight crafted a partnership or epic games that developed the publisher of fortnight crafted a partnership with samsung and samsung's galaxy store was sort of the exclusive android app store distributing fortnight on mobile right and so this made me think maybe there's an opportunity here for me to come in and help samsung really grow a gaming ecosystem because samsung has tried and there has been a lot of stops and starts here but i think, you know, the i felt like the timing for this was not right, where samsung could really become a meaningful player in the gaming space tony morelan 11 37 so, as the vp of game services for samsung, tell me exactly what does that cover for samsung? jong woo 11 44 sure game services covers the galaxy store and game launcher within our mobile device ecosystem tony morelan 11 52 so tell me why is it beneficial for developers to build for galaxy store when really, they could just have their apps available? on the google play store? jong woo 12 02 yeah, that's a great question and the question that, you know, we get from all the developers that we talk to right and, you know, we certainly don't believe that it's necessarily an either-or situation, right? you know, but what we want to do is we want to provide developers a story ecosystem that allows for better discoverability, right? we want to sort of create an ecosystem that is curated for the best in class games the google play store is generally bloated with a lot of content and for an individual developer, particularly a game developer to get noticed within this ecosystem is nearly impossible right? and, you know, like we mentioned, people just aren't going in looking for new content on their own anyways, like most of that traffic, going into the google play store, is being driven through paid media from you know, facebook ads or what have you, right so we wanted to build a thriving ecosystem inside the galaxy store that isn't bloated with content that is really curated for the best in class the galaxy store is one part of the samsung mobile ecosystem, right that it also includes things like samsung pay and samsung daily there is a, there's a whole suite of owned and operated services within your galaxy device that has a lot of users, right and a lot of engaged, people are opting in into these services on a regular basis and so, you know, our ecosystem is really designed very well to drive discoverability of new content within our ecosystem and we sort of share that inventory across all our owned and operated properties and so this really strong value proposition that i think the value the galaxy store brings to game publishers is that we are able to augment the marketing initiatives that they are doing with some of these discoverability mechanisms and channels and because we also work with fewer game developers, because it is sort of a curated game store we get to build relationships with these developers and work closely with them to craft promotions and marketing initiatives on a regular cadence right? we're and we're, as part of that we're able to also activate a myriad of other businesses within the samsung ecosystem, from samsung members and rewards, as well as our device marketing initiatives to really help drive game awareness, engagement and monetization for our game publishing partners tony morelan 14 35 and i'm sure developers want to hear about the revenue sharing can you share a little bit about the revenue share model and why it's unique to samsung? jong woo 14 42 yeah, so i mean, i think, you know, obviously, the revenue share for you know, app stores generally you know, we talked about 7030 now, i think tim sweeney from epic games has very publicly said that, you know, the revenue shares for these app stores should not be 7030 and i think the entire sort of development developer ecosystem has responded, well, initially, it was wait can we really say that? and then sort of quickly followed by? yeah, i think that's true right and i think, you know, samsung has is in a position where we can be flexible with our revenue shares, we can work closely with our publishing partners to determine the revenue shares that will allow them to really thrive within our ecosystem, right and build businesses that are sustainable within our store platform so there is a want on our side to work closely with our game publishing partners to determine what the right revenue share is going to be, you know, given their marketing activities and given the engagement of our audience to those games that's going to allow both the platform as well as the game and the publishers to really grow and thrive tony morelan 16 07 so you had mentioned that game services also covers game launcher? can you explain what is game launcher? and why is it? why is it so special? sure jong woo 16 15 so game launcher was initially designed to help mobile gamers aggregate their game icons into like a single location so it's sort of like this really nice game folder, if you will and the utility of that was that it really decluttered your home screen and so you can imagine sort of the level of engagement with this app, right? the average game launcher, user opens game launcher more than 80 times a month and so that's like, nearly three times a day, right? so definitely high engagement and what's really sort of special about game launcher is that this is now a property that people are opting into or sort of launching on their own voluntarily, multiple times a day so we've got this really deep engagement here but that engagement right now, or the utility of that engagement really centers around sort of getting access to the games you want to play and so we want to expand the utility of game launcher to drive deeper engagement within this ecosystem around gaming right? and we believe that there is more than just playing games that you know, avid gamers do, right? they are engaging, and in communities, they are watching other gamers play via livestream they are checking out youtube videos to get tips and tricks they are, you know, reading about games, through a myriad of different publications and content sources they are, you know, on reddit communities, they are on discord like there is this whole ecosystem of games outside of the game itself, right and so you know, what, we're looking to do with game launcher and truly make it special and unique is because start to become a hub for all of that gaming activity outside of actually playing the game tony morelan 18 12 i want to kind of circle back to something you'd mentioned earlier and you were talking about how monetization you know, there's some drawbacks to that tell me about like, creativity wise, do you see that it's limiting people's, you know, developers ability to create, you know, unique games? jong woo 18 26 i do at the end of the day, you know, when you are, you know, starting out as a game developer and build, you know, you make a decision to build a game company, right? you are looking to find that balance between doing something creative and innovative right as and also generating revenue from it to sustain your business but i think when costs of scaling and marketing your game are driven by the market from you know, real time bidding and programmatic, sort of ecosystems on the mobile advertising side and then the revenue shares remain at 7030 there's sort of a squeezing of margins, that's tends to happen, right? in order to maximize that equation, or optimize that equation, you need to start getting more aggressive with monetization right? and when you start getting aggressive with monetization, you start to lose i think, the creativity inside your game when you have to start focusing on how do i ensure that i can scale up this game and really focus on the revenue you realize you need to take less risk, right building a game they say is sort of a hit driven business, you know, very much like hollywood studios and moviemaking and to a certain extent, i think that is true and so you know, when you are in a situation where the costs of marketing your game are so high and you know what kind of critical mass you need to really scale your game from a player's perspective, taking a lot of risks in terms of pushing the envelope for innovation, it becomes prohibitively expensive, right? because there is a likelihood that the game might completely flop and so that's why, you know, our hope with the galaxy store and the samsung gaming ecosystem is that we can provide a value proposition back to the, to the developers and whether that be in sort of, you know, better marketing, through our discoverability channels that is designed to help augment whatever marketing you know, these publishers are trying to do, as well as you know, potentially better revenue share on the back end we can we can start to unshackle the shackles if you will, of sort of this this business machine and allow people sort of the flexibility and the breathing room to be more creative with their game design, and their gameplay tony morelan 21 03 so you had talked a little bit about gaming culture, and you know, knowing that you've been in this industry for so many years, i'm sure you've seen that culture change and evolve tell me a bit about like, what was the culture when gaming first started, you know, started coming onto the scene here, and then how it's evolving and where it's going jong woo 21 20 yeah it's been a really interesting shift from sort of this underground basement, sort of nerdy boys only kind of sort of culture phenomenon, right where there was also sort of a stigma around gaming being sort of like that good for you you know, like, nothing beneficial really comes from it you know, some people have even said, you know, i've tried to try to tie gaming into sort of, like, you know, real world phenomenons like gun violence or whatever it is, right, like, people have tried to put gaming and sort of there's negative light and it's now become sort of this aspirational lifestyle and oh, and it's expanding beyond the actual games themselves, right? like you are now starting to see personalities, people, you know, almost celebrities coming from sort of this gaming world and you're seeing things like esports and live streaming they they've moved from this sort of niche underground thing into sort of full mainstream pop culture legitimacy, right? you're seeing content creators from twitch or youtube are esports athletes becoming these celebrities with these massive fan bases who are extending beyond just you know, their gameplay it's going into you know, instagram and it's going into twitter, and twitch and youtube and these people are becoming full blown influencers and celebrities right a lot of them even have hollywood agents, right? who are negotiating, you know, variety of different deals on their behalf so with this, you're starting to now see sort of fashion and lifestyle also being heavily influenced by this gaming culture and a massive group of young gen z gamers and even non-gamers who are aspiring to this lifestyle right and i kind of equated to the skateboarding culture where skateboarding used to be very underground, right? and very niche and then it sort of translates now into this mainstream cultural phenomenon where it's very sort of equivalent to it like street wear, where people wear vans, and you know, wait in line for hours for you know, drops from supreme and they've never owned a skateboard in their lives it's fair right, so yeah, so you know, i think it's and i think the social distancing sort of environment that we are in now is only sort of like accelerating this change, right, like gaming, and socially hanging out and sort of like an online environment is, is sort of feeding more into this culture and, and breeding more legitimacy into it and it's sort of, frankly, it's really exciting to see tony morelan 24 26 yeah, definitely i mean, my son's a big-time fortnight player, and some of his best friends he's never met i mean, they live in hawaii, canada, germany i mean, it is really neat that he's got this this social group that really spans the globe, that you know, truly are some of his best friends jong woo 24 44 that's right and i think you know, and the same as it has been for me as well in the past, right, like there are people like when you play a game every day, you engage with the same people, whether they're in your guild or your clan or you know, your squad you engage with these people that you've met actually inside the game on a regular basis right on nearly daily and oftentimes spending hours with them, you probably spend more time with these friends that you've never met in real life before, then you do your actual friends right? and so yeah, it builds this sort of, like new network, as well as this sort of new definition of i think what friends can be and it's really cool i think that they all get to socially hang out inside of these games, right? like, you could be playing fortnight with your squad and it's not necessarily about you know, getting that victory royale and winning, right? it's just sort of about doing this really fun activity together, chatting and hanging out while you do it and so i think i love the idea of games becoming now this sort of like social platform for hanging out tony morelan 25 52 so tell me in what way is samsung moving beyond the galaxy store and game launcher on mobile devices? jong woo 25 57 yeah but there are a lot of initiatives from the services standpoint around gaming beyond the galaxy store, but it's still relatively early days right now, for example, we are thinking about, like, what is the leanback gaming content look like, given that there's so much viewership on twitch, you know, particularly with sort of social distancing and covid these days now, most of gaming tends to be lean in where you're sort of like engaging with this content interactively but you know, twitch is now demonstrating that there is this massive and captive audience who is willing to sort of lean back and just watch other people play games and so what does that necessarily mean? and how does that translate into, let's say, tv screens? you know, does that mean that, you know, people are willing to do this in their living room, as opposed to sort of like on you know, laptop screens and i think we also sort of think about how samsung can stay ahead of the curve with regards to upcoming gaming trends that we're starting to see, right and, you know, i personally am trying to figure out how samsung can lead the charge in things like cloud gaming, or vr and ar, right these, these technologies and these platforms that are around and people have talked about some for many, many years, but haven't really gotten into sort of like mass scale yet so you know, we're definitely thinking about a lot of these things right now tony morelan 27 34 so i want to talk a little bit about samsung next so samsung, next is a division here at samsung that helps build and grow software and services from entrepreneurs and organizations that complement samsung's hardware tell me how they're getting involved with game services jong woo 27 49 so we work closely with samsung next so samsung, as you mentioned, is sort of that early stage venture arm of samsung and part of their remit is to invest and build sort of early and growth stage startups that can complement samsung's existing business initiatives or actually even jumpstart completely new strategic initiatives that, you know, we, as a company decide to expand into and i think sort of given the strategic priority that gaming, from a service standpoint, has within the entire organization of samsung, and it's not just the mobile, right you know, the visual display division, the pc divisions, you know, the r&d and hardware division, there's a lot of different potential stakeholders are who are very interested in and gaming, what gaming can look like for samsung and so, you know, we engaged really closely with samsung next, to figure out what kind of companies are doing really innovative things in the gaming space that might help us jumpstart some of these gaming initiatives, particularly around you know, some of the things that i just mentioned before cloud gaming ar vr ar, you know, as well as you know, complementing existing businesses like the galaxy store, you know, we, we, i try to work with samsung next to identify those needs that we might have as we think about the strategy of go to market for some of these various initiatives and then samsung next also helps us to better understand sort of the landscape of early stage companies and the really cool, innovative things that they're working on tony morelan 29 28 so what advice do you have for gaming companies looking to build a relationship with samson? jong woo 29 32 yeah, you know, i would say, definitely reach out to us we do want to know what you're building and the more innovative the better right the galaxy store and the gaming ecosystem that we are striving to build we are building it because we want to foster innovation, right? and, and so you know, we want games that can push the envelope of gaming on mobile devices can be we want companies to be thinking about you unique technologies, you know, housed inside of our devices like 5g and edge computing, and what can that enable from a gameplay standpoint? and so, you know, we love seeing what the development community comes up with and so, you know, definitely, i would say, reach out to us and you can reach out to us through our website, which is developer samsung com tony morelan 30 22 excellent well, hey, jong, i want to thank you very much for taking the time to join me on this podcast it was a lot of fun to chat and get to know you yeah thanks a lot outro 30 29 looking to start creating for samsung, download the latest tools to code your next app, or get software for designing apps without coding at all sell your apps to the world on the samsung galaxy store check out developer samsung com today and start your journey with samsung the pow! podcast is brought to you by the samsung developer program and produced by tony morelan
Develop Smart TV
docsamsung checkout this topic describes how you can develop a billing system for your tizen net tv application, to allow users to make purchases within your application related info tizen tv service billing namespace samsung checkout dpi portal guide samsung checkout for web applications samsung checkout dpi portal samples samsung checkout net application samsung checkout web application samsung checkout offers an optimized purchase experience for your users on samsung tvs the user can quickly and safely register a payment method and make frictionless payments repeatedly within the tv environment in addition, samsung checkout provides a comprehensive global monetization platform, which allows you to integrate various business models and promotional campaigns into your services the tv-optimized purchase experience provides the user a quick and simple 3-step checkout, once a payment method is registered the checkout requires only number-centric information to be entered, making it easy to use with a tv remote control users can register their payment method directly on the tv or through a mobile phone to use samsung checkout within your net application, the user needs tv samsung smart tv, 2018 or later model payment method credit or debit card, paypal, or samsung pay in korea security tizen secureime, 2nd-screen card registration mobile or pc account samsung account for sharing account and payment information with galaxy phones importanta samsung account is mandatory for using samsung checkout samsung checkout assumes that the user is logged in to samsung account at all times you can manage your product application and product sales through the dpi digital product inventory and process the actual purchase through samsung checkout importantall application data that is saved locally on a tv is deleted when the application is deleted from that tv if the user's purchase history is saved only in the tv storage and not remotely, and the user deletes and reinstalls the application, all application settings and content are removed, including purchased content if your application saves purchase information in the tv storage only, inform the user that uninstalling the application deletes their purchased content the dpi portal provides functions, such as "purchase history unapply" and "refund", to help you address situations when your customer inadvertently deletes application data before proceeding with the unapply and refund processes, you must contact a samsung representative by going to "samsung apps tv seller office > support" and creating a "1 1 q&a" support ticket samsung checkout purchase process when a user wants to purchase a product on your application, samsung checkout provides a common purchase gui, which identifies the user and confirms first the purchase and then the purchase completion after the user completes the purchase, samsung checkout returns the purchase result to your application product, purchase, and payment management the following figure illustrates how you can use samsung checkout and the information in the dpi server to manage in-app purchases and payments in your application request the purchase list retrieve the customer purchase list using a purchase list api request respond to the purchase list content if there are products in the purchase list which are not applied, verify the purchase and apply the products if there are products in the purchase list which have been refunded, retrieve the products send the application result to the server request the product list request the product information list using a products list api request the user purchases the product when the user selects “buy” in the application, provide a common purchase gui through samsung checkout the user can enter a voucher or coupon code to modify the purchase price the user confirms the purchase by entering a pin on the common purchase gui, or biometric information on samsung pay samsung checkout delivers the purchase result to your application request the purchase list update the customer purchase list verify the purchase verify the purchase using a verify purchase api request apply the product apply the product using an apply product api request, and send the application result to the server dpi service environment the dpi service provides information on buyable products in your application and the purchase history of your customers it serves the appropriate product information for the user's country, provides user-specific purchase information, and manages applying the product after purchase the dpi service also assures purchase integrity and provides security through preventing fraudulent access the dpi service environment is divided into 2 separate zones operating zone prd for live production applications when you submit your application for publishing, set it to use the operating zone notewhen a refund of a real payment is made in the operating zone, a charge is applied on you consequently, do not use the operating zone for testing staging zone dev for development and testing the purpose of the staging zone is to facilitate the billing linkage development this environment minimizes the exceptional country-specific cases that can happen when real payments are made in the operating zone the staging zone also includes a dummy payment testing option, where the user does not need to register any payment method, but can still use all the dpi services as in real payment transactions dummy payment actual payment table 1 dummy and actual payment screens the following figure illustrates the dpi service environments implementation information for each dpi service environment is described in the following table service environment details operating zone environment web portal https //dpi samsungcheckout com/ example billingrequestservertype servertype = billingrequestservertype prd; string securitykey = "*****"; // your security key issued by dpi portal // can be different from sandbox's ssecurity key staging zone environment web portal https //sbox-dpi samsungcheckout com/ example billingrequestservertype servertype = billingrequestservertype dev; string securitykey = "*****"; // your security key issued by dpi portal staging zone with dummy payment environment web portal https //sbox-dpi samsungcheckout com/ example billingrequestservertype servertype = billingrequestservertype dummy; string securitykey = "*****"; // your security key issued by dpi portal table 2 dpi service environment details when you submit your application for publishing, make sure that it has been fully integrated with the billing system ensure that the application detects the service environment and sets the server type accordingly check that the product and price information in the operating zone prd matches the tested information in the staging zone dev no data is automatically shared between the zones registering a test user payment method when the user registers their credit card as a payment method in samsung checkout, they can do it through their mobile phone or computer web site by entering the authentication code when you are creating a test user for your application, pay attention to the url you use to enter your authentication code and register a payment method each url requests a different server to handle the payment operating zone prd https //www samsungcheckout com or http //www payon tv staging zone dev https //sbox samsungcheckout com or http //sbox payon tv
Learn Developers Podcast
docseason 3, episode 3 previous episode | episode index | next episode this is a transcript of one episode of the samsung developers podcast, hosted by and produced by tony morelan a listing of all podcast transcripts can be found here host tony morelan senior developer evangelist, samsung developers instagram - twitter - linkedin guest tobias thorsen & peter holm, biodome games, galaxy store not only do we chat about their award-winning mobile game gold digger frvr, but how being acquired by a larger game publisher has allowed them to focus more on game development, while the publisher handles the marketing aspect of producing games listen download this episode topics covered biodome games studio spelunca frvr best of galaxy store awards publishing on galaxy store marketing discoverability galaxy badge generating revenue integrating iap music diversity and inclusion helpful links gold digger frvr - golddigger frvr com facebook gold train frvr - facebook gold train frvr - goldtrain frvr com biodome games - biodome games frvr - frvr com frvr careers - careers frvr com galaxy store badges - developer samsung com/galaxy-store/gsb-promotion galaxy themes - developer samsung com/galaxy-themes samsung developer program homepage - developer samsung com samsung developer program newsletter - developer samsung com/newsletter samsung developer program blog - developer samsung com/blog samsung developer program news - developer samsung com/news samsung developer program facebook - facebook com/samsungdev samsung developer program instagram - instagram com/samsung_dev samsung developer program twitter - twitter com/samsung_dev samsung developer program youtube - youtube com/samsungdevelopers samsung developer program linkedin - linkedin com/company/samsungdevelopers transcript note transcripts are provided by an automated service and reviewed by the samsung developers web team inaccuracies from the transcription process do occur, so please refer to the audio if you are in doubt about the transcript tony morelan 00 01 hey, i'm tony morelan and this is the samsung developers podcast, where we chat with innovators using samsung technologies, award winning app developers and designers, as well as insiders working on the latest samsung tools welcome to season three, episode three on today's show, i'm joined by the founders of biodome games to be a sourcing in peter home not only do we chat about their award-winning mobile game gold digger, but how being acquired by a larger game publisher has allowed them to focus more on game development, while the publisher handles the marketing aspect of producing games oh, yeah and we also chat about how their game studio is now called studio spelunka enjoy hey, i am excited for today's podcast to be interviewing, not just one, but the two founders of biodome games to be a source in and peter home hey, guys, welcome to the podcast thank you thank you so let me first start by asking who is to be as thorson? tobias thorsen 01 04 well, i'm 40 years old, i grew up in rural denmark far out west, i would describe myself as a programmer with somewhat of an artistic sense i like programming not because i'm particularly good at writing beautiful code, but because it gives a degree of control, and you get a final say in the product you're developing and i really like that tony morelan 01 28 that's great and now we also are joined by peter home tell me who is peter holm? peter holm 01 36 well, self-taught game design, usability, user experience, business, creative direction type of guy yeah, i enjoy making games tony morelan 01 47 wonderful so toby, let me get back to you what is your role at biodome games? tobias thorsen 01 53 i'm the lead programmer, and gameplay and vendor and then i'm a co-founder, tony morelan 01 58 wonderful and peter yourself, what is what exactly is your role? peter holm 02 04 aware of many hats i'm the ceo formula game design, producer, artist tony morelan 02 13 so let's talk about the history by a dump because i know that you guys were acquired by fr vr and actually recently changed your studio name to spell blanca but i understand that your history goes way back that you guys were actually friends in kindergarten so give me that full history of, of the two of you how you guys started working together, and how that led up to biodome games and eventually now spin like a studio peter holm 02 38 well, it all started around the lego bricks in kindergarten tobias thorsen 02 45 it's true, somewhat, peter holm 02 47 somewhat true, at least professional working together, but started animation studio and could make where we did 3d animation and space, spare time we started making a game and that spare time project kind of got out of hand and turned into a game that we actually released and that was 24 years ago or something? tobias thorsen 03 10 yeah, we released it in 2000 peter holm 03 14 no, no, no, we didn't the first one was in 98 it was really tobias thorsen 03 20 so long ago tony morelan 03 23 the internet was just, you know, starting out what was the process for releasing those games? tobias thorsen 03 29 well, the game was kind of an experiment it was called chases and i was just getting into game development while working at his animation studio, where peter also works i kind of pivoted back to programming, which i did a lot of when i was a teenager so i tried experimented with programming, a small game, which was at first only meant for our own enjoyment i wanted a top-down shooter that i could play in split screen with my friends so i made that, and it was quite fun and it just turned more and more advanced and like when you're young and new to project like this, it just takes it on its own life and you develop and develop and then at some point, we figured that, hey, this is a product, we are having so much fun playing it every weekend, we played it and so we figured that other people could enjoy this and so we decided to do it ourselves and back then it meant making our own cds and sending them by mail so there was quite a task, but there was really there was how game distribution was done back then wow and tony morelan 04 38 what was the platform that you guys built it on? that was tobias thorsen 04 40 windows and to my great regrets i programmed everything in visual basic because that was the language and you back then yeah, and visual basic was definitely not made for game development so i had to do all sorts of tricks to make it work and it just got more and more advanced and then at some point, we figured now it's enough and we made the cds we made 1000 cds and sold them one at a time from our website tony morelan 05 11 i know my brief experience with gaming back in the late 90s was using flash and i understand that you guys have some experience also, using flash back in those glorious days of the of the late 90s tobias thorsen 05 26 yeah, well, after, after our game chasers, we sold like 200 copies and we kind of realized we couldn't make a living from that so we had to get a real job so we started doing advertisement games and other flash games and that that was really the platform for gaming back then on the web was flash peter holm 05 49 and it kind of happened by accident that that what we did back then turned into becoming an actual game company because i think at that point, from my, my perspective, at least, making games was kind of a side gig, hobby, hobby thing but what i was desperately into was actually flesh and getting 3d animation onto the web using flash magic that was kind of the big thing back then tobias thorsen 06 17 yeah fancy ui designs and stuff like yeah, peter holm 06 21 fancy ui designs, and wow, transitions and whoa, what not? common colleague, and i found a company focusing on just that, and, and we kind of figured out along the way that hey, wait a minute, maybe we could just do some flash games and it seems like people want to buy those, and so on all of a sudden, we had a gaming company, with a ton of clients all over the world and tony morelan 06 45 that was fun and what was the name of that gaming company? peter holm 06 48 there was a tunic, like titanic but cartoon instead, so tony morelan 06 53 okay, yeah and the success yeah, the success of that, did that go down? peter holm 07 00 it went down? eventually yes but i will say that we left it to be as an ai, we left the company in 2007 a year after that it went down so nothing on us it was a series of unfortunate events that led to the company crashing tony morelan 07 21 so i understand that you guys built a company, cape copenhagen, correct that actually, like flourish, you had, you know, lots of employees over 30 employees you learned a lot of lessons from that company and some of the challenges that came out of that tell me tell me a little bit about cape copenhagen peter holm 07 38 yeah, so cape copenhagen came out of the out of chasis the first game we've made way back, and titanic so actually, we left that company in order to make a new version of chase as that was the big dream, we established the company that in turn turned into cape cod and that company was focused on chasis to begin with, and we worked on a demo for a long time, and we pitched it to publishers, and we didn't seem to be learning the right deal at any point so we left it and returned to flash games, tobias thorsen 08 12 i fell into the trap that many game developers to programmers, particularly that i want to make my own engine sure that was possible back in the 90s, and beginning of the 2000s, but at that point, 2008 it was the scene was so diverse with graphics cards, and sound cards and hardware all over the place and multi-platform so it really was a too big of a task again, i made a lot of programming that turned out to be dead code, because you can't maintain such a big code base for so many cases and get out into all the corners with your own tech at least not one guy peter holm 08 54 yeah, we painted ourselves into a corner with that project and tobias thorsen 09 00 share yeah, multiple times peter holm 09 03 so learning from that we return to the stuff that worked in titanic and return to making flash games for clients and then at some point later on, we finally made the jump to unity and 3d games tony morelan 09 21 and was at the beginning of biodome games no, the peter holm 09 25 beginning of biodome games is later so keepcup magnet almost existed for 10 years wow and i think we were almost 40 people at the peak and at some point we had a lot of stuff lined up but it all fell through and having a business that rely on client work and all the client work disappearing that's, that's not really healthy sure and we hadn't really managed to build a really solid foundation because i think we wanted too much on the same time really wanted to do great plant work but we also wanted to make our own games, which is by definition underfunded yeah, so that was a very difficult balance to strike tobias thorsen 10 11 for 10 years, we kind of swapped between the two, and we couldn't make a clear path we didn't really want to focus entirely on client projects and we didn't want to take too much funding and get economically dependent by taking big investments and not having our own company yeah, sure so we were kind of flip flopping around for 10 years, until we could no longer flip flop peter holm 10 38 yeah so we were stubborn, and flip flopping and refusing to take other people's money and so on so it was it was kind of yeah, maybe not that smart of a choice but anyway, it was fun tobias thorsen 10 53 it was it was a great company i really loved my colleagues, amazing company tony morelan 10 59 so it sounds like then eventually, there came a moment where you decided that it was best that you just close the company, correct? peter holm 11 07 yeah, at a at a at some point it was basically out of our hands we had, within the same week, we had three almost signed deals that disappeared and that was really enough to take us out of business so we had to close down and that was the beginning of biodome games tony morelan 11 28 so then, so then you interbase decided to still continue working together, you obviously are determined to find success, peter holm 11 37 we actually had a conversation at some point where we were looking at each other than just meeting room and things were just collapsing around us and we kind of okay, so what we're going to do get a job i don't know how to get a job we basically we were unemployable at that point, i guess we didn't have a choice tony morelan 12 01 so that was it it was just you looked at each other and said well, you've got me and i've got you so let's figure out 12 07 something like that tony morelan 12 11 so with the with the closing of cape copenhagen was that the beginning of biodome games, peter holm 12 17 at cape copenhagen we had a third partner who, brian, who we work with for many years, he had left the company i think, one and a half years before we went belly up basically, he had to he had to do something else with its life at that point he was he was kind of burned out on client work and stuff like that but around the time that we went belly up, and we had the infamous conversation and in the meeting room about having no choice but to start a new company, he had probably around that time joined, joined a little startup called frvr and we kind of followed along and looked at what they were doing while we were doing other stuff because we still wanted to do our own games we had a client project that could get biodome games running, so we didn't have to take any funding and stuff and that was basically our plan just to chug along, do a project end and then fund another game that we wanted to do tobias thorsen 13 22 yeah and i remember brian liftin, in melta, at that point, and he was back in copenhagen and he was really, really trying to sell this idea that we should work for frvr very hard we are skeptical what's, what's this? and it's hypercasual? and is that really our gig peter holm 13 43 instant games? what is this? yeah tobias thorsen 13 48 it felt like a return to something that we left many years ago in titanic and flash games sure so we weren't, we were not really convinced in the beginning and we had some other projects and very artsy projects lined up for ourselves and i remember we made this calculation at some point, if we're going to succeed with our own game and distributing it and making a steam version of that game and becoming a hit it was it was really unlikely and the numbers just told us well, we really just have so much better chance of succeeding if we go with prime and this tony morelan 14 26 is because i mean, it's really was just the two of you still, i mean, it's not like you had employees it was the tobias thorsen 14 31 two of us yeah, yeah peter holm 14 33 yeah and then we really tried to stick to gut feeling about making our own game and realizing our artistic ambition through that game, but as at the same time, we really wanted to achieve that commercial success and i think the message that that brian came with, why don't you shove your artistic ambition and allow yourself just to be commercial for once, sir and i think, as you said, to be as that it would be a marathon to maybe get the game finished and maybe get it shipped and so on but because the scope was smaller, and the tech was more accessible and they had good channel relationships and could get our game out there, i mean, that would just make a lot of sense and it played to all our strengths and so on tobias thorsen 15 23 it turned out to be a no brainer, because what we lacked they had, we didn't have any connections in the industry to publishers, and we didn't know how to put a game on facebook instant or steam and let alone peter holm 15 38 samsung galaxy store yeah tobias thorsen 15 43 so we kind of saw well, maybe we don't have to sacrifice our artistic integrity just because it's an instant game or just because it's a small casual game, who still make something that that would be ours and feels like something we want to work on so tony morelan 16 01 sure so then you decided to work closer with frvr and they acquired biodome games? tobias thorsen 16 08 no, not at this point okay, peter holm 16 11 actually, we decided to enter a publishing agreement with them so we basically made an exclusivity deal with them we got to use their tech and in return, they promised to try to publish our games if we made something good, of course and that was just a huge relief to take that step and start making small games and then yeah, fast forward two years and four games, and they acquired us because we had proven that that we have something that actually worked tony morelan 16 48 and just so i have a good understanding frvr is basically handing like the publishing and the marketing but that you guys are still pretty much a standalone team, your own your own studio, correct? peter holm 17 00 yeah, the new setup is, is 100% frvr own studio, but we have full autonomy we can do what we want basically, as long as we try to make long term business sense of course, in our industry, it's a first party studio, meaning that the publisher owns the studio and we keep working on our games on the games from biodome games that would transfer to this new entity, it feels like our studio and be treated like our studio tony morelan 17 30 now now recently, you decided to change the name from biodome games to spelunka correct? peter holm 17 37 yeah, that was that was part of the of the setting up a new studio so biodome games guild formerly exists now it's basically a holding company okay but, but yeah, so the new studio is called frvr studios belong? tony morelan 17 53 and what is the what is the meaning? what is the thought behind spelunka? tobias thorsen 17 58 spelunka means cave exploration and if you go spelunking you explore caves no, it's quite suiting for gold digger tony morelan 18 08 yeah, is very appropriate i myself actually have spent a very little time but did one day of spelunking definitely was during my, my youth when i didn't have a fear of small spaces and claustrophobia i can't imagine getting back down into the earth like i did when i was younger and climbing around those caves is exhilarating peter holm 18 31 i wouldn't last a second environment; it would be so horrible tobias thorsen 18 38 it's good thing we can do it in a games and tony morelan 18 41 yeah, wonderful so tell me now about spelunka how many employees are you guys? peter holm 18 48 for? so us and two other guys and we were still looking to hire more people with can still kind of figuring out what kind of people we need but more developers needed? yes yeah, we tobias thorsen 19 02 are three programmers now and then peter so we are going to need some more assistance with the graphics and game design and these parts tony morelan 19 13 wonderful well, i know a lot of people who listen to the podcasts are always looking for opportunities for work so i'll make sure to include links in the in the show notes are there any links that we'll be able to share related to maybe applying for a job at splunk and studious? peter holm 19 28 yeah, i think we have one opening now on the fob career side but i think we'll add some more in the near future tony morelan 19 37 so let's talk about the relationship with samsung how did that actually come about? peter holm 19 41 again, we have to point to two ffvi they seem to be really amazing with the challenge relationships and that's, i mean, that's a huge win for us because we can really focus on game development that that relationship with samsung that ffvs been able to build them? in part on our behalf? is it something that we're really grateful about? tobias thorsen 20 06 yeah, i think at first our games were mostly published on facebook and then when they were kind of proven that they worked and the generator revenue they expanded to the newly formed channel on bixby i think back then it's a couple years ago tony morelan 20 25 so i wasn't familiar with that so bixby, our voice assistant, is that what you're referring to? peter holm 20 29 yeah, i think there's still on older devices that hadn't received updates, you would still be able to swipe right and then you would open a discovery surface called bixby as well, where the games will be featured and that was the first appearance on samsung devices to my knowledge, so yeah, it seems to be a lot of samsung channels that the game is feature tony morelan 20 58 so last year, you guys were the winner for the 2021 best of galaxy store award best instant play game tell me tell me what did it mean to win that award? peter holm 21 11 that was pretty special i'd say we had not seen that common i mean, we hadn't imagined in a million years that we made an award-winning game i mean, we knew we made a great game and a fun game, but we haven't seen it as a as a game that would win an award so it was super happy about it tobias thorsen 21 32 in retrospect, i could see that the game stands out a bit it's a combination of gameplay and, and style that's that i haven't seen many places tony morelan 21 44 so let's talk about gold digger i mean, i played it because i was part of the team that was going through all the nominations and selecting who was going to be a winner it was a very addicting game to play but tell the folks out there what actually is gold digger tobias thorsen 22 00 i remember when we when we came up with the idea, because we were i think we were talking about digging game peter holm 22 08 yeah you mentioned you mentioned boulder dash as i remember it, you look over your screen and say, you remember the tony morelan 22 15 boulder dash? i love that game peter holm 22 17 as a yeah oh, yeah yeah, that was that was a great game maybe we should do something like that use it and i said, oh, yeah and we can that match three elements so you match the gems and i think that was the conclusion of our game design and brainstorming session, as i remember it it was tobias thorsen 22 37 very, very brief and which, which is, i guess, a good thing that you could describe a full gameplay with the one minute of talk hey, let's try that that could work and i peter holm 22 48 think it was only a couple of days later, you had the first prototype running us, i remember it at least and then of course, a few months until we had tobias thorsen 22 57 playable in the frvr bible when they recommend gameplay ideas to pursue one of the key points is mashups of, of different genres so not don't make a clone but try to mix and match different areas and see what that leads to tony morelan 23 18 so the gameplay there's this little there's like this old man miner who's going around smashing rocks looking for gems correct? peter holm 23 27 actually, when you play this kind of a fast-paced mining game, which is kind of a maybe because mining is, is in real life, it would be really slow pace but i guess that was the inspiration we took from balderdash that we wanted it to be speedier and like an explorer it's so it's i think it's as much an exploration game as its mining game, taking game but yeah, you view push rocks around and match them up and when you align three or more rocks, they explode and, and help you excavate and then there's a lot of stuff to discover and pick up, buy and sell tony morelan 24 07 so i remember seeing at the time when you win the award, you guys produced a meme a great photo graphic of your first dollar that you earned on gold digger side by side with winning the samsung award tell me about that peter holm 24 23 yeah, it was quite a revelation for us to allow ourselves to be focusing totally on making something that made money so making our actual first dollar was quite an event so we made ourselves an award to celebrate the moment and we awarded it to us so thanking us for the award so yeah, that was that was how it started making our own awards and how it's going winning actual awards from samsung that was that was quite a tobias thorsen 24 58 in many ways goes to go has become the game that we dreamed of making for many, many years all the time in cape, we were talking about how it would be so great to have just a small game that would make a little bit of money to support one guy who could work on this and it took the end of cape copenhagen and the rise of a new company before it actually happened for us peter holm 25 20 in a way you could say we've been working on this game for 22 years tony morelan 25 28 so i understand that gold digger is not the only gold game in your in your franchise that you have another game called gold train, frvr tell me tell me about gold train? tobias thorsen 25 39 yeah, that was the first we made it was it's a more traditional, proven gameplay in many ways it's a based-on pipe mania, also a very old game where you match train tracks to make the train run okay and since we kind of knew what kind of game we were doing with, we chose that game for just getting to know the tech from frvr so it was kind of a training game training train game tony morelan 26 10 that's great peter holm 26 11 at that point, we had decided, of course that we wanted to make a game that would make us money so in order to cast the rights bill over the game, we needed something with gold and it seemed to work okay, tony morelan 26 25 so tell me what is the platform that you're building your games on tobias thorsen 26 30 html5, and built on the engine that frvr provided it's all javascript, very old-style javascript, so no modern shenanigans it's, you have a script as it looks 1015 years ago so it's in many ways, it's, it's very easy and very simple to get started with but when a project gets really complex, it's it has its own challenges as well tony morelan 26 57 yeah, i think there'll be a lot of limitations with it but you guys have found a way to work within those limitations to create something that's that successful tobias thorsen 27 05 yeah, i'd say some of the bigger challenges has come now that we've hired new programmers who has to take this two-year-old code base that i've been working on exclusively, and try to figure out what's going on our first-time employee, he was really, for a month, and he was so confused so we decided to make a major cleanup of the code and we've been working on that for a couple of months now, tony morelan 27 32 how funny i can take that as like, you know, you take this really top-level auto mechanic, and then you throw an old ferrari at them and say, alright, yeah, get this going here peter holm 27 45 but about the limitations, i think part of the charm of working with this is actually the limitations that you have to impose on yourself and your ambition and that's, i think, part of the reason that we can make it work tony morelan 28 00 it's interesting, because, you know, my, my background truly is in graphic design and i often teach the opposite of that, in the sense that, you know, when you're creating a logo, you don't want to limit yourself by diving right into a program, like adobe illustrator to start designing your logo that really, you should grab pencil and paper and start sketching so that you don't have any limitations but it sounds like you know, your approach having to work with him in this javascript, you've got some limitations but i would think that, you know, that that must trigger certain parts of your brain where you really have to think like, how are you going to get this done? peter holm 28 39 yeah, i think i think would you say about logo design is totally true, i would definitely go for a pencil first but again, that's the pencil is a conceptual limitation that you put into the process at that point true so i totally agree with that one but in this case, i think one of one of the great benefits about the limitations we have on the platform is that there's a lot of stuff we just can't do period so we don't have to get distracted by ambient occlusion or real time shadows, or hdr lighting or stuff like that that's completely irrelevant to the gameplay but if we had every single tool, we could so easily get distracted by stuff that's not super essential to get right tobias thorsen 29 27 yeah but essentially is it's a sprite engine, you can display sprites, and you can display a lot of them but that's it there's no spinning stuff, and no 3d had hardly any animation system we had to make that ourselves also tony morelan 29 45 oh, wow so i would think that the process i mean, tell me is it would you say it's quicker i mean, i know that some of these game developers that i've that i've chatted with, it takes them years to go to market on a design that they're working on those limitations actually help speed the process could you can't go down all these different avenues and work on things such as 3d and lighting yeah, definitely tobias thorsen 30 06 in the beginning, it's a, it's very, very fast to make a prototype and try something out and i think the challenge really comes when you're when you're continuously working on a project, and it gets more and more complex, because then yeah, this group really has its limitations sure peter holm 30 25 yeah and i think the platform's says a lot about your shadow choice as well, you wouldn't, you wouldn't go ahead and make a first-person shooter and that wouldn't make sense i mean, you wouldn't have you would pick another tool for it from the first prototype until gold digger went live i think that was about three or four months or something tony morelan 30 44 like that it's so quick peter holm 30 47 yeah, and it's a great joy to work with that quick turnaround, because you get something done, right? tony morelan 30 54 yeah and you get the feedback so quick, because as soon as you put it out there, you start i mean, you had mentioned that you would first release like on facebook instant i mean, you almost using that as your testing platform so you release it quickly like this, you get that feedback and now you can get back into the studio and start finding ways to really improve on it before it gets out to the to the larger audience peter holm 31 13 exactly exactly and you have actual people playing it and having opinions about it and telling you what, what they think about it that that's just so much more fun than sitting deep in the trench working on the same project for two or three years without it seeing any type of reality tobias thorsen 31 35 and a lot less risky, of course, saves a lot of money, too i peter holm 31 39 would say yeah oh, yeah, definitely tony morelan 31 43 so i'd like to talk a bit about the marketing i know that frvr is handling all of this for you what were some of the tools that work because i've seen some banners that you guys have done on galaxy store peter holm 31 54 yeah, for us at least privileged situation that that frvr handles most of that and we basically just supply them with, with assets that they can they can build banners and stuff from tony morelan 32 07 the end if some of these banners were related to different seasons, whether it's halloween or valentine's peter holm 32 13 oh, yeah, yeah yeah so what we did recently was, was some seasonal updates for the game we had a super nice christmas update for it with a snowy landscape and you could explore the mine and find christmas decorations and stuff and i think you could even get a santa hat and yeah, i think we had a very nice feature from samsung on that and of course, that's so nice to see that they will yeah, spend some nice storefront for the game tony morelan 32 58 so tell me, are there other games that you guys have produced outside of gold digger and gold train? peter holm 33 04 yeah, we have we have two other games we have the pot rush, cool rush mini golfing game and a pool game tobias thorsen 33 13 it's a very casual approach to pool and a very casual approach to mini golf it's a sure something that a hardcore pool player woods would find appalling because you just you just sit there and you shoot balls, if the balls and get them in that into the hole it's very simple and it's not even on a pool table it's an endless trek tony morelan 33 40 lsa check that out tell me so where are you guys getting your ideas for games? peter holm 33 45 i don't know i mean, sometimes it's just like what we talked about with gold, they got this two reference points, and then they have a weird connection other times it's, it's more like, what type of interaction would be fun? what would feel good? okay, and then in turn, how could we turn that into a game? i think that the pool russian portrush games kind of grew out of that approach we kind of wanted a very simple interaction that would be fun and quick to repeat i think we had a few iterations of that before it kind of gelled into a pool game and a mini golf game tobias thorsen 34 28 and it was very much inspired also by one of our vrs biggest hits, which is a basketball game, where the only thing you do is to flip basketballs, okay, and have to hit the hoop so the gameplay style is quite similar you just shoot balls again and again and again you can get really good at it and you can suck at it tony morelan 34 52 i remember there was a game a long time ago, very similar where you would just throwing trash into a little trash bin peter holm 34 57 yes yeah i think that that's that, for me at least that's been that's been kind of a fascination all the way back from the first flash games that how much can you boil down the experience? how small can we make it and still make it enjoyable? i still think that's very much motivation for me at least two or a driver for me at least to see how, how tiny can you make it? how much of a great experience can you make with the smallest mechanic possible, basically? tony morelan 35 28 so tell me what is your process for designing, developing in and then publishing a game, if ar tobias thorsen 35 35 vr has a set of goalposts, you have to reach first you make a prototype that the guys there review their game designers, and they look at the game and try to give their input on whether or not it would succeed, or if it has potential than if, if they approve it, and think we might be able to do something with that we make a prototype, and it's been put out on a very limited market so there's a small subset of players who get to play it and then during this process, the retention is measured and you see how many people are actually returning to it and these are paid users, they are advertising, and people come and play and then there are a set amount of iterations where you try to improve in each iteration to see if you can get the game sticky enough and this process is, in large part to avoid working a lot on a game that doesn't have potential that's not going to work in the real world so if you pass through these goalposts, you, it's published to a wider audience worldwide peter holm 36 41 okay and i think and i think if we should just talk a bit about our internal process as well, it would be more something along the lines of running with a gut feel, up until the point where we felt we have something that would show some kind of potential yeah, and then trying to find the smallest subset of that, that we could take to a level where it could actually be tested in in live circumstances tony morelan 37 11 so we've seen a lot of success around gold digger, can you tell me like how many active users do you guys have playing the game? peter holm 37 19 across samsung channels? i think we're seeing about of course; it goes up and down with stole features and stuff, but an average about 100,000 active users a day wow so that's, that's pretty neat tony morelan 37 33 yeah, that's, that's crazy to guys just creating a game like that and you've got over 100,000 people playing it daily tobias thorsen 37 40 it feels really weird in the beginning, when it started to take off and i remember, at the start, we were extremely popular in vietnam, and poland tony morelan 37 51 really, yeah, tobias thorsen 37 52 there was some strange demographic that we never fully discovered why, but yeah, peter holm 37 58 yes, sometimes like that, you suddenly get a spike in in a market that you didn't expect at all tony morelan 38 03 so obviously, revenue needs to play a part somewhere when it comes to the success of a game so tell me what is it that you guys are doing to help generate revenue while playing gold digger? peter holm 38 15 well, the very basic stuff is, of course, that the main revenue is coming in from ads, we try to find convenient, or you could say, quote, unquote, natural places to show ads and hopefully, some players would click those ads and when they do that, that generates some revenue back to us also on platforms that support it we have in game purchases, so you could actually pay real money to buy stuff tony morelan 38 46 so what are your what are your key learnings? when it comes to iap? peter holm 38 49 the key learning i think, is that people actually want to pay for stuff when they enjoy the game so if you make a great game, people will definitely pay for stuff in the game tobias thorsen 39 00 i remember in the beginning when these in app purchase issues came up with some smurf game where people bought smith berries, and i was very skeptical of them, but who's paying for this? but again, it's uh, if you make something that's actually fun, and people want to play, then they'll pay tony morelan 39 19 yeah, i was listening to a podcast once different market that they were talking about ip in a sense that, you know, they could have hundreds of 1000s of people interacting with this, but all it takes is a small percentage that are willing to pay and that truthfully can generate a decent amount of revenue that because the reach is so big, and it's a global audience, that it just takes a few people you know, interested in actually paying the they can really help bring some money your way? peter holm 39 46 yeah, yeah yeah it is it is a game of volume, because you need a lot of ads to be shown and you need a lot of players to have enough players that would actually want to spend money on it as well tony morelan 40 03 so one of the things that really stood out for me when i was playing gold digger was the music so let's talk a bit about the music of gold digger peter holm 40 11 we're fortunate to work with a really great composer that is also happens to be a friend and former colleague, his name is rasmus hdmi, and if anyone is out there listening and wants to music, you should definitely know because this is so great actually, we work with him in our past company and, and he's, he's working with the fob as well tony morelan 40 34 yeah, so the song that we just heard leading up to this question that was from gold digger, and a few of the other songs that one that we started the podcast off with, and one that we'll be closing with those were from gold train so yeah, absolutely beautiful music that you guys are creating there and frvr it's tobias thorsen 40 52 actually something that people come and done we get a lot of feedback where people say, hey, what's up music? peter holm 40 59 actually, there's a funny story about that composer back in the day, we made a game for lego and it was for a disney themed ip and we needed some music for that game and our composer was patmos, who made the music for these games as well he made some disney inspired music that was completely original he made it all from scratch and once disney had to approve the game, they were kind of going out okay, where's that music from? what movie? did you rap? tony morelan 41 35 really? peter holm 41 36 oh, it's totally original music it's so they were they were kind of impressed with him so tony morelan 41 44 wow so he does music for not just you guys, but for many of the other franchises underneath fr vr, correct? yeah peter holm 41 52 yeah he said, i think he's the closest thing they get to a house composer tony morelan 41 57 so what advice would you give developers looking to bring their games to galaxy store? tobias thorsen 42 02 work with a great publisher? peter holm 42 05 yeah, the advice we took was, was work with frvr yeah, tony morelan 42 10 that's great and i love hearing about that because i know a lot of indie developers, their challenges, they've come up with a great game but these are not marketing people these are not publishing people i mean, these really are great game designers and then where do they go? how do they take their game out to the public? so it's wonderful to hear that there is a resource with a company like frvr that these indie developers can turn to, they can actually bring their game to market tobias thorsen 42 35 yeah and it's hard work doing publishing and it's hard work to maintain the relations with different outlets like the galaxy store, it's not something that you just walk in from the street and say, hey, can you put our game on the store and featured? i think a lot of game developers forget about it i did for many years, i thought it would just make a great game, then it'll all come by itself that's not true peter holm 43 03 selling is hard, right? it's not something you want to do next to you making the game job you want dedicated people to take care of that tony morelan 43 12 yeah and i would think that really game developers they've got that their brain is wired for being creative in wanting to code or, you know, figure out the technology behind it the last thing i want to do is like get on a phone and try and start doing the marketing yeah, making those phone calls to try and you know, get their game out there to be seen peter holm 43 32 yeah, exactly it's, it's liberating to hand it off to someone who knows what they're doing tony morelan 43 38 so what is in the future for spelunka? peter holm 43 41 well, the near future is way more gold digger and i think we have a lot of fun ideas for making the game even more fun for players and yeah, and we're just looking forward to dive deeper into it tony morelan 43 57 and i know you guys are a small company, you just are a few people what are in your future plans related to diversity and inclusion? peter holm 44 06 well, right now we have to be totally honest, which is for white dudes all the same age, all sporting the same beer guard and stuff like that so it's kind of i mean, it's not really diverse, but, but we really want to change that up we strongly believe that diverse teams make better decisions and better games sure and we're super happy to first experience when the game kind of came out that it is a very even 5050 split male female really, okay yeah and it's a rare thing to get something like that yeah so we really want to emphasize that and i think the age wise the audience is extremely wide as well we have young kids playing it and we recently had a very nice letter from 70 something year old gentleman who we enjoyed playing it with his wife wow so i mean, it's a, it's a very, very wide audience and we want to cater to that tony morelan 45 08 yeah yeah, that is that is very unique now and the game is very new i mean, it is it is a young game, do you have plans of maybe like offering the ability to skin your character to be able to create something that maybe somebody relates to a little bit more? peter holm 45 21 yeah, i don't think everyone wants to be that red bearded, grumpy old minus i think it would only be fair to enable people to make their own characters and so on that's, that's part of it of the scope as well as some points yeah, definitely tony morelan 45 38 so to me, it's tell me what is it that you do for fun outside of work, i understand that you actually are a pretty artsy person tobias thorsen 45 47 well, when you sit all day and program and stare into a screen, it's quite nice to do something physical so i've been doing lots of stuff over the years with the painting and arts and lately i've been doing a lot of comics, so it's quite new hobby for me tony morelan 46 04 ceramics really? so pottery yeah, pottery tobias thorsen 46 07 and modeling and doing crazy sculptures i've never thought much about these things until i really tried it and when i when i held an item that i made, which was all glossy and looks totally finished, yeah but it was quite a nice experience so i dove more into it it's very rewarding to have to eat out of a plate that you made yourself tony morelan 46 40 that is wonderful so and peter, let me ask you what is it that you do for fun outside of work? i understand that you actually like to pretend to be a lumberjack peter holm 46 50 yeah, i do i do i have a big, big, badly maintained garden and a small strip of forest that that i can joyfully call my own and once in a while we have a storm that that troubles a tree and i get to cut it up and chop it for firewood and stuff like that so i really enjoy you could say rough gardening like that also woodworking, artsy, artsy, do it yourself projects with all the kids, which of which have four tony morelan 47 26 wow, that's excellent so i have one more question for you since you guys became friends you said back when you started kindergarten tell me who is better at sharing to be or peter tobias thorsen 47 40 sharing tony morelan 47 42 yes peter holm 47 44 that's definitely to be as to be as a very, very generous soul that shares all these good ideas tony morelan 47 55 that's great you guys, it has been absolutely wonderful to chat with the two of you you guys are doing great work at splunk and i'm looking forward to seeing much more down the road on galaxy store tobias thorsen 48 06 thank you very much thank you peter holm 48 07 it was a it was a pleasure to talk to you closing 48 09 looking to start creating for samsung download the latest tools to code your next app, or get software for designing apps without coding at all sell your apps to the world on the samsung galaxy store check out developer samsung com today and start your journey with samsung tony morelan 48 26 the samsung developers podcast is hosted by tony morelan and produced by jeanne hsu
We use cookies to improve your experience on our website and to show you relevant advertising. Manage you settings for our cookies below.
These cookies are essential as they enable you to move around the website. This category cannot be disabled.
These cookies collect information about how you use our website. for example which pages you visit most often. All information these cookies collect is used to improve how the website works.
These cookies allow our website to remember choices you make (such as your user name, language or the region your are in) and tailor the website to provide enhanced features and content for you.
These cookies gather information about your browser habits. They remember that you've visited our website and share this information with other organizations such as advertisers.
You have successfully updated your cookie preferences.