Communicating with your audience has been a keystone to our success at Cocos. We have always taken the time to listen to our developers as well as give them a space to talk in our forums. Both in Chinese and in English. These have grown to larger groups that talk about everything in the industry, not only our products. But things have changed.

In China, we have added QQ or WeChat to talk to each other directly, but for many game developers outside of China, the new and popular way to talk about game development is on the chat software, Discord. Discord has become the new way of doing IRC and has added many great features that many older developers wish they had back in the early days. This includes sharing files, giving emoticons to comments, and having sections for your server. Today, it’s estimated to have over 150 million MAU and continues to grow. Even Cocos has a Discord server.

Last year, Discord started to build new ways to have users communicate with each other on their servers. One idea is the beta testing of the games lab, a place to beta test games and apps that can be played inside individual servers. The first games and apps available on this beta server included poker, checkers, and a YouTube viewer.

This month, Discord has now introduced games (known as activities) to everyone’s servers, with some games being free and others behind a subscription. The first game that is free to everyone is a game built by the Discord team using Cocos Creator. Putt Party has become one of the biggest games on the platform and a fan favorite since its release.

We have been working with the team ever since the group came to our server for questions and discussions about how to improve the game before and after its release. We have been delighted with the success of Putt Party as the game has been getting lots of fun videos on YouTube and positive interest from those playing it in the games lab.

For those new to the game, Putt Party follows the idea of mini-golf, where you putt a ball through different obstacles on the course. With Putt Party, the game adds power-ups like a wind that will blow you towards the hole or against it, as well as inverted controls, and ghost balls that let you putt past large obstacles. With so many playing at once, you likely will hit many other people or use your power-ups to block them from getting a low score.

The game has been out on the Discord Games Lab server for months, and with the announcement of games available to servers, we can now talk to the team about the game's creation. We asked them early on why they decided to use Cocos Creator. One member commented on the speed of getting the game on their web and PC/Mac application.

The fun that comes with hitting hole-in-one or adding a trap to your friends has made for a lot of fun, but it has been the first game built with Cocos Creator for the team. The team at Discord loves Cocos Creator for how easy it is to use with HTML5 and WebGL.

The team also is happy at how we have been able to support them in their creation of the game. We’ve been very open to helping talk to them about the game and having discussions on improving the game engine.

We want to thank the team at Discord for trying out Cocos Creator and for their support as they start to build more activities on the platform. Their requests and suggestions have given us more help in understanding not only what developers want but their support of our own Discord group.

With Discord now having games with Cocos Creator, we can add one more name to the many different platforms we are on, including Tesla, HooRoo, Rokid, and airplanes in the future.

Cocos Creator is everywhere, and we’re supporting everyone and every platform we can to build amazing new opportunities for developers in every tech space.