Moving from Everyplay to Megacool

With Everyplay announcing that its service is about to close, we thought this would be a good time to show you how easy it is to move to Megacool and keep your players sharing your game. In this post, we’ll walk you through the implementation so you can see just how straightforward it is.

At Megacool, we focus on helping players share short gameplay clips — GIFs — with the ultimate goal of helping your game to grow. We’ve refined the share loop to make it as easy as possible for players to share, and increase the likelihood that their friends, family and followers will want to jump into whatever game they’re playing.

We’ve streamlined this loop to make sharing super-fast to whichever channel the player prefers. How fast? This fast:

Megacool allows C.A.T.S. players to quickly preview and share a GIF of their gameplay.

You can read more about the advantages of Megacool over Everyplay here, but these are a few things that you should know:

• Unlike Everyplay, Megacool does not require sign-up or log-in from a player.
• Unlike Everyplay, Megacool shares auto-playing GIFs for fast consumption.
• Unlike Everyplay, Megacool’s SDK detects gameplay highlights automatically without player intervention.
• Unlike Everyplay, Megacool provides deep analytics on the user journey from shared gameplay clips: who clicked a link, who went on to download the game, and where they came from.

How to migrate to Megacool

Megacool’s SDK works in a similar way to Everyplay, so if you’re familiar with that service then switching should be a breeze. Here’s how to switch, in just three steps:

1. Initialize the SDK

Create an account at megacool.co and download the SDK. Make sure Megacool is the first thing to start when a player opens your app. This is to ensure installs and re-engagement through Megacool get tracked correctly.

void Start() {
  Megacool.Instance.Start();
}

2. Implement gameplay recording

Megacool’s SDK currently enables three types of recording, designed to give maximum benefit to different types of games.

1. Time recording is best-suited for gameplay where timing is essential, like endless runners or action games.
2. Highlight recording tracks the intensity of the gameplay to capture the most action-packed sequence and creates one share-worthy moment.
3. Finally, Capture frame recording is ideal for more tactical, slower-paced games where the player’s moves are important — such as board games, card games and word games.

Think about which archetype makes most sense for your game. If you have implemented a recording button to trigger Everyplay, we recommend to remove this and automatically start the recording during gameplay.

Time recording

//Call when the gameplay starts
Megacool.Instance.StartRecording();
..
//Call when the game ends
Megacool.Instance.StopRecording();

Highlight recording

//Call when the gameplay starts
Megacool.Instance.StartRecording (new MegacoolRecordingConfig {
  OverflowStrategy = MegacoolOverflowStrategy.HIGHLIGHT
});
...
//Call when there’s an important moment
Megacool.Instance.RegisterScoreChange();
...
//Call when the game ends
Megacool.Instance.StopRecording();

Capture frame recording

//Call everytime the game state changes
Megacool.Instance.CaptureFrame();
...
//Call when the game ends
Megacool.Instance.StopRecording();

3. Add a “Share” call-to-action at the end of a play session

This will give your players the opportunity to share. In our experience, timing is vital when triggering this call-to-action in order to get the highest possible engagement from your players. When you’ve picked your moment, add this code to share the recorded GIF:

// Connect this to a share button
Megacool.Instance.Share();

To make sharing even more appealing to your players, add a GIF preview. This will automatically show them the GIF in-game, and will entice them to share their awesome gameplay with the wider world:

// megacoolGifPreview is a prefab that’s already placed in the scene
megacoolGifPreview.StartPreview();

Don’t forget to do a test run of your GIF sharing in action before you set it live.

That’s all folks!

One final thing you should know: with Megacool, you can also easily add rewarded referrals to the shares your players generate. This boosts conversion rate and helps generate more installs.

For a more detailed look at integrating Megacool with your game, please check out our handy Quickstart tutorial. Or, if you want to get really fancy with your integration, take a peek at our Customization guide.

Finally, we’d love to hear from you! If you want to discuss anything Megacool related (or even just want to say 👋), you can email us at hello@megacool.co or tweet us.