Personalizing the Built-in Experiences

Personalizing the Built-in Experiences#

The built-in Big Fish game experiences reflect the look and feel of the Big Fish brand, but they can be customized to fit the look and feel of individual games by changing the skin and layout of individual components. The look and feel of the screens can be changed by modifying the resource files that were used to build the screens.

The Rave SDK UI framework allows for native Android and iOS UI to be generated using XML- and CSS-based UI definitions. An individual screen (called a Scene in the SDK) is a combination of XML and native code used to lay out and provide UI functionality. Scenes are generally used for full-screen or dialog-based UI layouts, such as Login or Account Management. Widgets are smaller UI building blocks, such as a button with specialized behavior.

Every built-in experience has at least one XML layout and at least one controlling class, called the Scene class. The Scene class is native code.

Scene Resources#

The scene XML can refer to resources in the local app configuration, such as images, fonts or other XML. Resources can be redefined dynamically via an app configuration bundle and distributed live using the Rave backend service. The default location for resources on Android is in the assets folder of the game or app. The default location in iOS is in the Scene Pack’s resource bundle. Both platforms can share the same resources.

Changing the Look and Feel#

In order to change the color scheme, the skin or individual text or images used in the creation of the built-in experience, the individual assets need to be created and replaced in the exact file structure used in the project. Once replaced the project needs to be restarted for changes to take effect.

Attention

It is important the file structure stays intact so that the SDK and the logic in the Scene class are able to find the assets. Failing to do so may result in an error or an app crash.

Changing Layout#

Since all UI elements in the built-in experiences are dynamically created from XML and CSS scene resource descriptions, only the XML and CSS files need to be modified to change the screen layout. Similarly to the look and feel changes, the project needs to be restarted for those changes to take effect.

Changing Functionality#

If using the built-in Big Fish game experiences is not appropriate for a game, you can build completely custom game UI by using Rave’s data APIs. These APIs expose all functionality available through the Rave system and are used to build the built-in experiences.

For example, instead of integrating the built-in Login screen, you can build a custom login UI by using Rave’s login APIs.

Remotely Updating the Look and Feel of the Experience#

Since all UI elements used in the built-in experiences are dynamically created from resource files, by changing the resource files the look and feel can be modified. Rave supports remote upgrades of these resources. The Rave SDK regularly queries the backend service to check for updated resource files. Resource bundles with new contents can be uploaded through the Rave Developer Portal.

To update UI resource files remotely:

  1. Copy the /resources folder included in the project (and the SDK distribution) to another location where it can be modified safely. Make appropriate changes to individual asset files, CSS and XML files without changing their location.

  2. Once done making changes, create a zip archive from the resources folder called resources.zip.

  3. Upload the file to the Rave Developer Portal. See REF GOES HERE for instructions.

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