Some of the 188 games available on the PlayJam GameStick were not available on the OUYA. Ever since building my replacement GameStick server I dreamt of making the GameStick games available on the OUYA.
Andiweli had the same idea and went through the tedious task of installing and testing each of the GameStick games on the OUYA. The result was a long compatibility list.
This list sat for a year until he came back and asked how we could bring them to the OUYA. The main problem is that each game needs a special tv.ouya.intent.category.GAME intent in its manifest file - otherwise it will not appear in the PLAY menu. Manually adding that to the games is possible by modifying the original game .apk, but that breaks the signature and requires us to host two versions - neither of which I was fond of.
Community content
At first I tinkered with community content, a feature introduced with the Chickcharney 1.2.1353 firmware update - the last major update ever released. That feature was never used by any games, but I did try out the pre-compiled cc-sample app shipped with the 2.1.0 development kit. It didn't allow me to add custom entries to the play menu, though.
Bundles
Then I remembered that I already solved this problem for SNES games in 2015 by building a small launcher application that only acts as proxy to start the actual game. The Chickcharney firmware also brought support for bundles, which lets you purchase multiple games at once, and all of them get downloaded automatically! This would make the perfect solution: Bundle the GameStick game with the launcher, and people can click "download" and get both.
Two hours after I communicated my plan, Andi demo'd the first launcher in a small video.
Then I only had to think hard about a way to store the launcher data and cross-link the launchers with the actual games, build a script to convert GameStick meta data files into OUYA meta data files, modify the server software to automatically combine those linked games into bundles, expand the API documentation with the new information I got from implementing bundles and adjust the OUYA-API-to-HTML-converter to handle bundles.
7 days later I had everything in place and the first bundle downloaded on my development OUYA.
Fast-forward 4 days and we've got 11 GameStick games easily installable on the OUYA!
