Improved Game Testing with Google Play Games Management API

By Ben Frenkel, Google Play Games team

We’re always looking to help developers improve the gaming experience for their users on Google Play. So today, we've expanded our existing suite of Management APIs to let you fully control all resources in your Google Play Games-enabled game during development and testing, with better support for alpha and beta groups.

Let’s take a quick dive into the expanded offering.

• Reset a single tester’s state for any resource (e.g., achievements, leaderboards), or do it for all resources at once. For example, you can now completely reset a given tester’s data if they’ve ended up in a bad state due to an experimental build. You can do this for individual instances or all instances of achievements, events, quests, or leaderboards scores.
• Reset the state of a single draft resource for all testers, or do it for all draft resources at once. You can now reset all draft leaderboards in your game before publishing with a single API call. This ensures the members of your alpha or beta communities don’t have an unfair advantage on release day. You can do this for individual instances or all instances of achievements, events, quests, or leaderboards scores.
• Clear global match state for all real time or turn based matches composed solely of testers. You can now reset all turn-based matches on release day. This will ensure that all matches from that point on are on the release version of the game. This is available for both real-time or turn-based games.

These updates make it far less complex and error prone to manage data during testing, saving you time and improving the rate at which you can make and test changes to your games.

Play Games Management API background

The Management API is a set of tools that enable developers to do things like manage tester data and clean up bogus leaderboard score submissions. Developers can also use the API to control and manipulate resources (e.g., achievements, events, multiplayer match data).

Getting started

You can get started with the latest version of the Management API right now. Review the updated API reference documentation, start with an example management interface, or download the sample client libraries to get on your way.