In order to have an appealing platform for gamers, our core strategy is to assure game developers that our solution is the best one for them. During the past three years , we attended all major gaming events around the world (GDC, E3, Gamescom, Tokyo Game Show, China joy, Paris Games Week) with a specialized team dedicated to onboarding game developers and publishers. So far, we have more than 150 of them keen to publish their games on Ultra.
We are building Ultra with game developers in mind.
We want a platform that is easy to use, one that generates new revenue streams for our partners, and one that has powerful tools to accelerate their game development. Today we’re presenting a key part of our solution for game developers, the Ultra SDK.
A Software Development Kit (SDK) is a development tool containing documentation and software libraries used to create applications or games.
They are often provided by platform owners to let 3rd party software operate on or interact with their platforms. For example, the SDKs from Facebook allow you to integrate your web app into Facebook and interact with various Facebook services such as messaging or authenticating Facebook users via their login and authentication mechanism.
Game developers also use SDKs in order to get access to unique platform functionalities that reduce development time and complexity.
Some gaming platforms, such as Xbox, Playstation, and Steam have their own SDKs allowing games, for example, to make use of their in-game UI overlays such as achievement notifications, friends chat and in-game micropayments.
In short, gaming platform SDKs allow games to be more “connected” to the platform they are published on and enhance the user’s experience by providing unique platform functionalities.
Steam SDK and APIs
Steam is the most common platform that PC game developers use to distribute their games to a wide audience. Thanks to Steam’s popularity, the Steam SDK and APIs became the most common suite of tools among game developers. It is the most comprehensive solution that allows studios to considerably accelerate their game development by providing features such as virtual item inventories, leaderboards, in-game voice chat, multiplayer features, and much more. The amount of work required to build such features from scratch is considerable and not profitable for game developers. Generally, they would prefer to spend their time refining what makes their game unique and fun to play.
Until now, game developers who used advanced functionalities of Steam’s SDK were forced to stay within Steam. This changes with Ultra’s cross platform SDK. We’ve built an SDK that has feature parity with Steam and more importantly, it will be the first ever fully fledged game SDK that includes everything you need to effortlessly enhance your Ultra, Xbox, Playstation or Steam game with blockchain technologies including our own powerful NFTs!
Ultra SDK
Everything possible with blockchain technologies, such as new gameplay mechanics, virtual asset trading, user-generated content monetization, new marketing strategies, and even in-game financial incentivisation mechanics are soon available to all developers with unprecedented ease.
We enable game developers to focus solely on what they love and do best which is making games with awesome features. Ultra does this by handling what we do best: taking care of all the complicated blockchain related features such as:
- Transparent, free blockchain account creation.
- Private keys security and blockchain account recovery.
- Access to blockchain data.
- Management of a user’s blockchain NFT inventory.
- Facilitating game clients to make transactions on the blockchain without any middleman, allowing users to interact directly with the blockchain.
We believe our blockchain technology is going to be the first providing true mass market capability to the gaming industry and our first mover’s position will fill Ultra’s NFT marketplace with digital assets from all platforms.
Compatibility
Ultra SDK is a cross platform SDK allowing developers to make games and apps for MacOS, Windows, Linux, Android, iOS, Nintendo, Xbox and Playstation. It supports many popular frameworks and languages.
In other words the vast majority of game and app developers out there can take advantage of our SDK’s functionalities to effortlessly enhance their products with unprecedented mass market ready blockchain capabilities.
Our SDK offers everything they need to create or improve interactions between players and ease their assets management: Authentication, Gamification, Items Management, Leaderboards, Marketplace, Messaging, Multiplayer features, Notification systems, and many more.
Cloud code
We intend to take advantage of today’s lack of modern development tool sets by providing cutting edge solutions; Ultra is about to be the world’s first game distribution platform providing game developers an out of the box “serverless” online-service cross platform SDK.
By means of a custom Javascript-like coding language, comparable to Amazon’s Lambda or Google’s Cloud Functions, Ultra’s cloud code provides a new venue for game and app developers to easily create online services with minimal efforts. The technology is capable of effortlessly scaling for millions of concurrent users with literally zero maintenance and architecture complexity overhead for the developers who use it.
In addition to faster development cycles, Ultra cloud code SDK provides many advantages, including:
- Ability to execute custom server operations.
- No server maintenance and management cost overhead.
- Unlimited scalability with zero devops hassle free responsibilities.
- Ties in directly with platform functionalities and data: user authentication, leaderboards, achievements, NFT tokenization: less work, more benefits.
- Ability to change logic server-side without client update.
- Plenty of other benefits arising from Ultra’s SDK cloud code “total control” philosophy.
Cloud code can be triggered from:
- Client games and apps — via the Script Service APIs.
- Developer-operated servers — via the Server-to-Server API.
- Third-party services — via UltraCloud’s WebHooks interface.
- Triggered via other operations (API Hooks): any cloud script can be configured to be triggered automatically as a pre- or post-condition of any Ultra SDK API operation call such as; trigger x cloud code before or after a user transferred an item.
- Scheduled — scripts scheduled to execute at fixed time intervals.
Ultra’s SDK will enable game and app developers around the world to trigger all kinds of blockchain and non blockchain events with minimal efforts.
In a nutshell, developers don’t need to run any servers themselves and they don’t need to understand how to scale their infrastructure to match demand to efficiently support their users. That means no maintenance or infrastructure monitoring concerns. Ultra cloud code is capable of offloading from developers tremendous amounts of engineering and system architecture responsibilities, even if they don’t make use of our blockchain technology.
Ultra’s SDK allows developers to provide custom online services such as inventory management, asset ownership verifications, custom loot logic, data massaging, and custom real time marketing targeting capabilities in a cross platform environment absolutely impossible to achieve with any other platform SDKs currently on the market.
Virtual Items and NFTs
By purchasing games on Ultra Games, users are actually purchasing Game NFTs that prove ownership and unlock the right to download, play and get updates.
The SDK is being designed to also generate in-game virtual item NFTs which can be managed easily through an in-game user interface but also outside of the game in NFT marketplaces.
Not all virtual items are equal, either in value or use cases. With this in mind, Ultra’s SDK is being designed to enable both “legacy-database” virtual items and blockchain-based virtual items.
With our hybrid approach, game developers get to decide what’s best for their game, where it makes sense to have NFTs, and where it makes sense to have legacy items — all while using a single item management solution and SDK.
There is much more to be said about Ultra’s Unique NFT technology so we will cover them in the coming weeks in a dedicated article.
When and Where
Ultra SDK is a key part of Ultra’s gaming ecosystem. Now, game developers have the tools to bring blockchain features to their games seamlessly. It will be accessible very soon to every game developer allowing them to easily port their Steam, Xbox, Switch and Playstation games on Ultra!
If you are a game developer and want to receive access to Ultra SDK, please register here, we’ll be in touch.
About Ultra
Ultra is the first entertainment platform providing all key games industry services under a single roof, accessible through a single login.
Built around our PC games distribution store, Ultra Games, our platform will provide access to countless centralized and decentralized services: Discover, buy, play and sell your games and in-game items, watch live-streaming feeds, interact with your favorite influencers, participate in contests, compete in tournaments, and much more.
Ultra has been built to provide endless value for players, a fair playing ground for developers, and a whole new world of opportunities for the games industry.
For more information, visit ultra.io and onultra.io and follow along on Twitter, YouTube, Telegram, and Discord.
