Samsung MultiScreen Open Beta

I bring you tidings of great joy…


It’s Samsung MultiScreen Open Beta time!


This new SDK builds on our existing work with Samsung SmartTV and means you can make Android games which function as a second (third, or fourth) screen and controller for the Samsung Smart TV. Users can discover your games on either the phone or the TV, and they can easily launch the game on one device and play across both!


Connecting and Device Discovery


Unity runs on both the TV and the phones, so you can display whatever you want on any of the screens. If you have tried this sort of thing before over wifi, you might think that device discovery and data marshalling is a significant task to accomplish before your devices can even talk to each other.


With the MultiScreen Game SDK, however, you simply attach one script to a game object in your scene to get your devices connected. Then you can use Unity Networking to communicate between the devices.


Virtual Game Pad


Samsung provides some templates which resemble the Samsung Game Pad and function out of the box as a game pad in your game. Since they are Unity packages, you are free to customize them however you like, and even turn the virtual game pad into a full second screen experience if you want to.




Testing MultiScreen Games directly in the Unity Editor


We have created a new workflow in Unity for working on multi-device games for the MultiScreen Game SDK. With this workflow, you can open multiple virtual device windows in your editor. Each virtual device can be running a different scene. When you click Play in the editor, each virtual device runs directly in a Unity editor window, and can be resized and docked as necessary. The client devices will automatically connect to the TV device, so you can quickly iterate on your multi-device game.





To test multiplayer games, just open multiple virtual device tabs and click Play:





Deploying to multiple devices


What if you want to run on actual devices? In this window you can add each of your virtual devices and assign a scene list to each. When you click “Build and Run”, it will build and deploy to each device in the list with one click. Your second screen devices will automatically connect directly to the TV or to the editor for testing.



Templates and Samples


Samsung has provided templates and samples for different types of interactions to get you started.







How do I get access?


At this time, the Samsung MultiScreen Game SDK is only available to selected corporate partners. If you would like to use the Samsung MultiScreen Game SDK, please apply via the Samsung Developer site by selecting “partnership request”.


If you have any questions relating to Samsung MultiScreen Game, please email: mscreen.game@samsung.com