Today, in a post on the Android Developers Blog, Google announced two new tools that might be of interest to quite a few of the game developers out there. Among the releases is a new open-source 2D physics library called LiquidFun and a Unity plugin for adding Google Play Games support. These releases coincide with the news of additional game categories coming to the Play Store in February, which we covered earlier today.

[EMBED_YT]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bofu6Hw7u5s

[/EMBED_YT]

LiquidFun is a rigid-body physics library that does particularly well with fluid mechanics. It's based on Box2D, a popular open-source 2D physics engine written in C++ that has found its way onto quite a few platforms and spawned a few similar engines over the years. Like Box2D, LiquidFun is highly portable and already has support and sample code for Android, Linux, OS X, and Windows.

For the Unity developers in the audience, you can be pretty excited for the new Google Play Games plugin. In this first release, the plugin adds access to the Google Play Games API for sign-in, achievements, leaderboards, and cloud saves. Both Android and iOS are already supported, and this code is also open-source. Given the popularity of Unity, this should lead to a significant uptake in the number of games sporting the Play Games badge.

If you're interested in using either of these tools, start up your IDEs and check out either projects' github repositories for more details!

Source: Android Developers Blog