Hi Everyone!
I'm planning to release a simple game on Android and iOS soon, and I've started to look into ad integration and in-app purchases. I'd be grateful if you shared any relevant wisdom you've gained about it. In particular, do you have any experience about which ad-provider is the easiest to integrate with Orx, and what kind of ads work best with Orx?
For example, based on my initial attempts, I've noticed that using a hybrid Orx/Native layout in Android causes a significant drop in framerate. That means banner ads might be off-limits, at least while the main gameplay is active. Was that me dreaming, or is that a real problem. If so, are there any ways to mitigate it? Or did you just decide that full-screen ads are the way to go instead?
How about in-app purchases? Did you find a way to reduce the duplicated effort to get it to work on Android and iOS?
Any advice would be greatly appreciated
BTW, I've just got my hands on a Mac for the first time, and will be trying my first iOS build sometime this week. I'm hoping it'll be easier than Android, since Objective-C is better integrated to C than Java is.
Thanks
Comments
We do have some redundancy for most of the other platforms, but right now the only osx/ios-capable slave is my 2008 macbook which is almost never on lately (thanks to recent OS X updates, it takes ages to do anything on it, including invoking xcode).
I've received the Mac at work, as my working computer. So, I can keep it up during working hours. Do you have any pointers about how to set up the build slave?
I'll try to poke him soon then
any Ads SDK should be the same for orx on Android.
If you intend to show a top banner, you can setup your layout, load your Ad request and let it runs.
If you intend to dynamically show/hide the banner (for example only show in the menu, but hide during game play), you need to setup the Ad in the onCreate, and change its visibility through JNI.
I didn't noticed big performances issues, (but on Android it really depends on which device). You can try to set an opaque background color (#ff000000) to your banner view, but I'm not sure if Android will disable blending. The small overdraw for the banner shouldn't be a problem.
But IMHO (and experience), banner Ads for game doesnt works, so go with Interstitials, just don't abuse, and be sure to display when the user is NOT playing.
For IAPs, I think there are some SDK that allows you to write once the logic, and the binding with the real IAP platform is done though the SDK backend. But never tried.
Hope this will help.