Apple TV interest?

Hello!

I've been working on a project for the Apple TV. Part of this project required me to build a system that recreates the tvOS menu control scheme. By that I mean, for a given collection of menu icons you can change the currently selected icon by swiping towards the desired icon. The selected icon scales in size and will wobble towards your thumb if you don't do a complete swipe. This system works for scene objects as well as Unity UI. It can also be used to control a cursor that hovers over the current icon.

Anyway, I've been considering fleshing out this system a bit more and turning it into a plugin for the Asset Store. I'm wondering if there would be much desire for such a plug in. Are people developing many projects for Apple TV at all?

Any feedback y'all could give me would be greatly appreciated.
-John

 

The Apple TV asset in my signature has actually been doing quite well (it's an all in compassing input asset not just menus) so I'd say that there is quite a bit of interest in Apple TV stuff.

There actually is a different asset already on the store that does similar to what you describe with the menu's but it doesn't seem to have been doing as well, since it's near the bottom of it's category, but I suspect that's more due to the price ($30) for just menu stuff.

http://unitybuzz.com/stats/assets/tvOS_Menu_Creator/

I would think that given a more reasonable price there might be a market for it but I would think your idea would need to bigger in scope to really gain traction. The swiping interactions are already handled by default Unity, if all your adding is the wobbles and other effects, I would think it would be pretty niche. First off to be of use you'd have to have a lot of menu items which most games really only have 3 to 5 entries. Perhaps if you game had large inventories it would be useful, but this is a small subset of all Apple TV games.

Just my 2 cents, but in general writing tools is fun (especially if you had to make the tool anyway for your own game).

 

I implemented a similar system the other week, for a VR project and was really happy with how the parallaxing tiles work in VR(My one is not a full on asset just for my UI).

I think if you do it you shouldn't just support Apple TV but push VR as it works great in it!