Bring even more fun and connection to your games with Game Center, Apple’s social gaming network. Game Center lets players build an identity across Apple platforms and enables features like the Game Center leaderboards, achievements, multiplayer functionality, dashboard, and more. All-new Interface. MacOS Big Sur brings a new design that’s been finely tuned for the powerful features that make a Mac a Mac. Core features, such as the menu bar and Dock, take advantage of the large Mac display, with translucent backings and spacious pull-down menus.
See What’s New in Game Center
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Bring even more fun and connection to your games with Game Center, Apple’s social gaming network. Game Center lets players build an identity across Apple platforms and enables features like the Game Center leaderboards, achievements, multiplayer functionality, dashboard, and more. Add features within your custom user interface or take advantage of the updated Game Center user interface.
Leaderboards
Leaderboards let players participate in new competitions within your game and challenge other players to beat their score. Players see how they rank among global players as well as their Game Center friends. Game Center supports classic and recurring leaderboards. Classic leaderboards are ongoing and maintain a player’s score forever. Use these to showcase scoring for overall or lifetime events, such as all-time number of matches won or the shortest time taken to complete a game level. Recurring leaderboards are short lived and expire, then repeat after a set time — such as daily, monthly, or weekly. Use recurring leaderboards for timed live events — for example, to show the most matches won in a week. You can use one or both leaderboard types in your game.
Achievements
Achievements are special milestones that indicate when a player has successfully reached a particular goal in your game. You decide which achievements are relevant to your game and worth offering to your players. Players see achievements as locked, in-progress, or completed. You can also create hidden achievements, which only appear once completed. Consider using hidden achievements to prevent spoilers in your game and to surprise and delight players. You can provide up to 100 achievements, each of which can award up to 100 points, and your game can award up to 1,000 points in total. Keep these limits in mind when releasing the initial version of your game, as you may want to add new achievements in future updates. For variety, consider creating a set of achievements that require dedication and a range of skills to complete.
Multiplayer
Game Center supports real-time and turn-based multiplayer functionality, helping players find people for a match without leaving your game. Players can invite Game Center friends, contacts, and nearby players, or automatch with other competitors to quickly start playing.
Challenges
Challenges let players compete directly with friends to beat a high score or accomplish a specific achievement. By default, challenges are not displayed on the dashboard. Opt in to display challenges on the dashboard using App Store Connect.
Dashboard
The Game Center dashboard is a central place where players access their profile and interact with Game Center features that your game supports, such as achievements, leaderboards, and challenges. Add an access point within your game to let players easily visit the dashboard or you can deep link players to specific areas of the dashboard.
An access point can be added to any corner of your main menu or pause screen. When the access point initially appears, you have the option of showing highlights — such as the number of achievements or default leaderboard ranking — to give players quick insight into their progress. After showing any highlights, the access point collapses to display the player’s profile avatar.
Discovery on the App Store
Games with Game Center enabled are included in the Friends Are Playing section on the App Store, allowing players to browse and discover new games their friends are playing. And on your App Store product page, players can see which of their friends play your game.
Enabling Game Center
To get started, add Game Center as a capability in your Xcode project and configure features in App Store Connect. Then use the GameKit framework to implement the Game Center features you’d like to use. Before your game can provide Game Center features, you must confirm that the player is signed in to Game Center on the device. You can then also receive notifications for game invites, challenge invites, user changes, and more.
macOS Big Sur takes the most advanced operating system in the world to a whole new level of power and beauty, and makes your apps look better than ever. Widgets and the widget gallery help you deliver more value to your users. Adding intelligence to your apps with machine learning is simple with extensive tools, models, training capabilities, and APIs. You can create more powerful Mac versions of your iPad apps with Mac Catalyst. And you can easily bring your extensions to Safari — and to the App Store.
All-new Interface
macOS Big Sur brings a new design that’s been finely tuned for the powerful features that make a Mac a Mac. Core features, such as the menu bar and Dock, take advantage of the large Mac display, with translucent backings and spacious pull-down menus. The new Control Center, designed just for Mac, provides quick access to controls while keeping the menu bar clutter-free. Notification Center puts recent notifications and powerful new widgets together in a single view for at-a-glance information as you work. And a streamlined new design for apps features full-height sidebars and integrated toolbar buttons.
Widgets
Easily build widgets using the WidgetKit framework and the new widget API for SwiftUI. Widgets now come in multiple sizes, and users can visit the new widget gallery to search, preview sizes, and add them to Notification Center to access important details at a glance.
Safari Extensions
With support for the popular WebExtension API, it’s even easier to bring powerful extensions to Safari. Xcode 12 even includes a porting tool to streamline the process.
The new Extensions category on the Mac App Store showcases Safari extensions, with editorial spotlights and top charts to help users discover and download great extensions from the developer community.
Machine Learning
With macOS Big Sur, creating apps that leverage the power of machine learning is even easier and more extensive with additional tools in Core ML for model deployment, new models and training capabilities in Create ML, more APIs for vision and natural language, and improved resources for training on Mac and converting models to Core ML format.
Mac Catalyst
Create even more powerful Mac versions of your iPad apps. Apps built with Mac Catalyst now take on the new look of macOS Big Sur and help you better define the look and behavior of your apps. You can choose to turn off automatic scaling of iPad controls and layout, allowing you to precisely place every pixel on the screen. Provide full control of your app using just the keyboard, take advantage of the updated Photos picker, access more iOS frameworks, and more.
User privacy on the App Store
The Mac App Store helps users better understand apps’ privacy practices. You’ll need to enter your privacy practice details into App Store Connect for display on your product page.
Apple Store Mavericks
Tools and resources
Mavericks Apple Store Near Me
Mavericks Apple Store Black Friday
Use Xcode 12 and these resources to build apps for macOS Big Sur.