Gaming

Would Google Maps seems to be game changer in developing Real-World games ?

Kanishka Sharma

Jul 21,2024
3 min read
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3.45 thousand Views

Google Maps features a huge amount of data that can be useful to anyone within the world. For navigational purposes, it’s go-to, but there are also many other potential benefits. Google Maps supplies a worldwide updated map and lots of places are often viewed at street-level via Google Street View. Games that utilize real-world navigational data like Pokemon Go. Google is implementing an API to allow game developers to build games with data from Google Maps to be available to developers.

Google is opening up its Google Maps Platform to everybody so inventors can fuse Maps information into their games. Its tools let developers use Maps data to build games that let you explore a modified version of the real world, similar to Niantic’s Pokémon Go. Google originally reported the tools in March 2018, yet they were just accessible to a "limited group" of studios and just ten games have been worked with them up until this point, as indicated by a Google blog post. So now, Google has created a “scalable infrastructure” that extends access to the Google Maps Platform to anyone looking to develop their real-world games. The announcement came from the Mountain View-based tech giant via an official blog post. According to Google, this move will allow game developers “to sign up and quickly get started online” to develop some epic real-world mobile games.

The company says indie studios and other developers expressed interest in using the platform, so the company has been working to scale up its infrastructure to allow any developer to take advantage of them. To plug the Maps information into games, Google offers a software development kit for the popular Unity game engine. Not only is Google opening up its real-time Google Maps data, but it's also providing a Unity Software Development Kit (SDK) to make it easier to include Google Map’s data into any game. Users can simply design worlds with data obtained from Google themselves, based entirely on real-life structures. You can then use this data to create a world for your game to require a place in, and within the case of Unity, assign textures and styles counting on what the object is. Google will be working with developers to ensure that they can find the best places to situate their games. Google’s tools let game developers do things like transform real-world locations or make those locations points of interest for a game.

Google claims

The company has also added new features to the Maps gaming tools since its 2018 launch, including a way to show higher levels of detail for areas that are closer to a player and less detail for those that are farther away. That could take up less processing power on your phone, potentially saving precious battery life. Now, following the launch of this new Maps SDK, Google added two new features to help developers enhance their games. These two features include Mixed Zoom and Pathfinding. The Mixed Zoom feature essentially helps developers to generate bigger playable maps while using less processing power. This is possible because the feature renders a high level of detail for areas that are close to the players. While the locations that are far away from the players renders in progressively lower quality. And the Pathfinding feature lets the developers create much more advanced in-game characters.

google maps for gaming

Now, to commence your project, go to this link to first create a billing account and get started with Google Cloud Project. Then you have to download the Google Maps SDK. Once you download the Maps SDK, both of the APIs will be enabled automatically. Follow this quick-start guide to start building your game. May be your game will give a tough competition to Pokemon GO. All the best !!