Hey Folks,

Today we wanted to give you a peek behind the OUYA development curtain and show off some of the features you can expect to see one day on your OUYA.

I’ll start off with one big caveat: None of these features have set launch dates yet. This is a look into the future — and re-prioritization can happen — but rest assured that we will release features when they are ready.

With that out of the way, here are a few things in the works that we think are pretty cool:

Better performance and polish in DISCOVER

DISCOVER has always worked as a functional way to browse and download new games – but at our office, we’ve always felt it could be better.  We’ve started implementing improvements that will give us noticeably smoother scrolling both horizontally and vertically. Additionally, we’ve added animations that will make things just feel nicer, and we’ve increased the cache size for tile images so that more can stay loaded at once.

Check out the video below to see it in action. NOTE: This is NOT FINAL. It’s still a work in progress, so tell us what you think.

Community Content

At OUYA, we frequently talk about ways to connect gamers with developers. Currently, we’re working on a way for gamers to build and feature user-generated content on their OUYA.  We’ve already started work on a new API that devs can incorporate into their games to expose this functionality.

For example, if a game has a level editor, you’ll be able to create a custom level, upload it, and let other gamers download and play it!  We can even make your level available in DISCOVER for gamers to download.

Community content has always been a huge part of PC gaming – we want to see the same amazing creativity flourish on a TV. Our goal has always been to bring amazing, new gaming experiences to the TV and we see this as a natural step in that process.

Developing Developers

On the Developing Developers front, we’ve made some improvements to our Unity plugin to make it more user friendly. Plus, we are cleaning up documentation and making more tutorial videos for the MAKE section 😀

Just yesterday, we released our new App Version Editor page on the Dev Portal.

The goal is to present all the necessary information in a more organized and easy-to-understand fashion (which also includes a cleaner look and some animation). Developers, you should have already received a dev newsletter with more detailed info.

OUYA Everywhere

If that wasn’t enough, OUYA Everywhere continues to go strong. If you haven’t already heard, we are partnered with Xiaomi to bring OUYA games to China. We’ve been hard at work getting everything in place to launch with them, and we are very excited to bring great OUYA games to a brand new audience.

…and more!

The cool thing about giving these updates is there’s always so much going on – more than I can cover here. For example, did you know we are working on more testing automation to help speed up test times and ensure a better product? It’s not sexy – but it’s a necessary part of improving OUYA. Achievements are still on the roadmap, as well as other social functionality.  =)

I also want to thank our great community for their support. Giving a peek behind the curtain is always a risky thing to do – but our community is so great that I’m really excited to make this post. Keep on creating (we are almost at 1000 games!) and keep on gaming!

-James