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.

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Kavalmaja by Tonypa

I recently finished Kavalmaja by Tonypa. It’s an puzzle-adventure game that I first played about a year and a half ago. I had probably spent 30 minutes with the game, getting deeply involved with it. Something interrupted me and got sidetracked and never went back to it. It was bugging me that I never finished it — so I did. And it was worth it.

The game of Kavalmaja is a well thought out dungeon. The goal is to collect all of the “gold pieces” in the dungeon, acquiring abilities along the way to progress further along in your journey. The game is presented in an abstract fashion, requiring you to move around and touch stuff to see how it reacts. As you interact with the world you learn what its symbols and colors mean. So an area you passed through earlier will have a different meaning later on. It ends up playing similar to a Zelda game but there’s something special about its abstract nature. In a Zelda game it’s clear that if there’s a cracked wall you need a bomb to get through it, the world of Kavalmaja the connections aren’t that obvious.

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