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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.
