Facebook leaderboard as seen in The Crazy Program on Android.

 I got a lot of feedback from my friends testing our new mobile game The Crazy Program. One thing that came up a few times was a request to have a high scores table to compete with your friends. I created a quick Facebook App version of Donut Get! last Fall and knew it wouldn’t be too much work with Facebook’s built in high scores functionality.

Facebook allows you to save high scores for your app without needing any backend. The caveat is that you can only save one score per user. So this works decently for a global high score for your game, but not so well if you have different levels and different modes. Facebook’s scores API will also return a list of your friends that are playing, in order of rank. This makes it very easy to hit the ground running with some social features.

Prime31 Social Networking Plugins for Unity

I decided to purchase the Prime31 Social Networking plugins to handle the communication between Facebook and Unity. I had a good experience with their in-app purchase plugins and the support was good. There were other options for Facebook plugins but they either weren’t for both Android and iOS or I couldn’t tell whether or not they could handle posting high scores. Some plugins seemed to just handle basic Facebook connect features, or at least this was the impression I got.

Prime31 Social Networking demo scene

I started development on Android. The example scene is straightforward and I got connected with my Facebook App fairly quickly.

Continue Reading…

It’s kind of hard to keep up with Flash game competitions. Every time I hear about one, there’s only a little amount of time left. And even if I know about them for a while, I decide at the last minute to enter! Here’s my last minute attempt to get the word out on a few.

2nd Games That Challenge the World Contest

Deadline: February 28th, 2011 at 23:59 est

Requirements: Make use of the Come2Play Multiplayer Api.

This is my first time hearing of this Come2Play system. From what I can tell, games that implement the API use a universal currency called ‘tokens’. You can check out the documentation to get started and Emanuele Ornella wrote a tutorial for implementing the Multiplayer Api that might be worth checking out as well.

Here are the winners for the 1st competition to get an idea of what the competition might look like.

More information at the Come2Play website.

Stanford Hackathon’s Flash game Competition

Deadline: Too Soon, February 13th at Noon PST

Requirements: Create a game with the theme of “benevolence”. Whatever that means…

Prizes: The best part is every submission wins a copy of FDT 4 Pure, the excellent ActionScript code editor. Which is awesome if you’re on Mac because you don’t have Flash Develop. Grand prize is Adobe Master Collection and a bunch of nice goodies. Check the page for the full prize list.

My homies the Super Fulton Bros. (Steve and Jeff Fulton) are judging this one, as they posted on their site. Jeff expressed concern for how subjective the theme is but that may make it more fun in the end! Part of what makes Apples to Apples so great — the other part being plenty of alcohol consumption.

More information at Stanford’s hackathon website.

Pico Day on Newgrounds

Deadline: April 30th

The yearly Pico Day event will be happening on Newgrounds not too long from now. It’s a while so there may be time to plan something! haha

If you don’t know what Pico Day is, it’s a where Newgrounds users submit a bunch of animations and games themed around Pico, the classic Newgrounds Flash game from like 10 years ago. It was a huge inspiration for me back when I was messing around in Flash 3. Gotoandplay genius.

Some info on prizing in the blog update.

Kongregate Monthly Competition

Deadline: End of the month! Every month.

I never knew Kongregate had a monthly competition. But it seems that they do.

More info at the Kongregate website.