The Google Maps Platform gaming services is a development platform for creating games that feature world scenes constructed from Google Maps geospatial data, and rendered at run-time by the Unity game engine. The platform provides simple, powerful, programmatic access to geographic data.
You can create an immersive gaming environment that replicates real-world surroundings. You don't just get a high quality basemap of the player's location, you get one overlaid with buildings and world geometry, and it includes metadata that lets you understand the world and build immersive gameplay. You can then enhance this basemap with styling, building textures, lighting effects, and physical properties (collision detection for example).
Your in-game characters can walk along streets, and depending on the enhancements you add, interact with the environment. You can place things like game prizes and monsters in game locations provided by Google (selected according to criteria appropriate for gaming), and then have players compete for/with them by navigating the real world, and interacting with your game world.
Component parts
The Google Maps Platform gaming services is made up of the following two components:
| Component | Description |
|---|---|
| The Maps SDK for Unity | A client SDK for Google Maps data, and a collection of Unity assets (materials, scripts, plugins, and example scenes). The SDK turns map features like buildings, roads, and bodies of water, into native Unity game objects. |
| The Playable Locations API | Serves candidate locations for use in games for things like spawn points and for placing game objects. |
Map and location data coverage
The data that the Google Maps Platform gaming services consumes (geospatial data that the Maps SDK for Unity uses to construct real-world scenes, and the playable location data provided by the Playable Locations API) covers the entire world, except for these unsupported regions.