Archive for the ‘Developer Facebook’ Category
It is rare that we hear a Facebook community that have not heard of Bejeweled Blitz before. Bejeweled Blitz is a great puzzle game that was made by Pop Cap, the same developers that brought you the 2009 award winning game Plants vs Zombies.
Gameplay
First thing I noticed in Bejeweled is that the gameplay has changed a bit after a few months never playing it. With the new added feature as earning gold coins and buying boosting for power ups.
Now we look at the basic gameplay. Bejeweled Blitz is like any typical puzzle game found in Facebook. However, what makes it most interesting here it that the game was originally made for home PC by Pop Cap and was brought to Facebook as a promotion to their company and other game lineup. This is a good strategy as Bejeweled is a game that is highly addictive and fun to play with. Rarely people will get bored with it, only frustrated and hair pulling at times.
The game works like any other puzzle game you know of. As your main goal to this game is to score as high as possible in just 1 minute under 1 round and yes, it is only 1 round. The game usually consists of various color gems around the screen and you need to get the gem in either 3 to 5 lines together to score. As you destroy the current gems, new one will be drop down for you to destroy.
With the given time of 1 minute the game started really slow at first, but once you reach to half the time provided, players will eventually start to panic and try to complete as many combination as they can. Along the way special power up will be available for the players and this is depending on players’ effort as well.
For the power up, players will need to combine at least 5 gems with the same combination in under 1 line, vertical or horizontal depending on the situation. There are 5 types of power up available for the game.
Flame Gem will make a big explosion to an area around it and destroy any gems around the area of explosion. Very useful if you have at least 2 to 3 of this gem together. To gain this gem one must get 4 gems in a line.
Star Gem, this is created by matching 5 gems in an “L” or “T” shape. The effect of Star Gem is to unleash its power by removing one column and one row of gems from the board.
Hypercube is the power up which players find it most useful. This is one power up that unleashes its power by destroying one color gem in the game. It is most useful feature is to combine with Flame Gem and Multiplier Gem, this allow player to get a lot of score points and also credits depending on the gem that you destroy.
Multiplier Gem is a gem that provides boost of score when use. Either comes with 2 times up to 4 times, depending on luck.
Gold Gem is the newest collection to the game. This gem allow player to get gold credits which allow players to buy extra boost to assist in this game.
After each round, players will be presented with a result of how they perform in the last game. Beat your high score and you will be rewarded with a medal that will allow you to show it to all your friends. Credits earn from previous games can be brought forward to purchase new power up (Boost)to be use in the next game and this boost will last at least 3 rounds before it is being reset.
Players are advice to use mouse for this game as it is more responsive and easier to navigate then using the touch pad.
Graphic
Bejeweled is a very colorful game as the gems are display in various shapes and color. Animation in this game is also very good as you will see explosion and lightning effects depending on the power up that you used.
Sound
Bejeweled Blitz has a very good sound in this game, but lacking on the music part a bit. Sound make by exploding and destroyed gems is very fun and once your counter reach to the last 10 second, players will be pressured to score as much as possible before it hits 0.
Conclusion
This is a very addictive game that will keep anyone playing for hours. Furthermore with score trees provided by the developers, this game will push players to beat their previous high score and also to get to the top of the ladder of top 10 players in the game.
Personal score to this game is 5 out of 5, well done Pop Cap.
Most people would agree that Facebook business page has become the next social media network goldmine for business both small and large. And even the businesses that did not fully understand Facebook are now beginning to take a closer look.
But you might be wondering how can a Facebook business page help your unique business. And though that might be a valid question, you have to understand that every business need one that to survive and that is customers.
Facebook has allowed their uses to use the power of applications to really make a name for themselves. The application of Facebook is so powerful in that it allows the developers to be able to control the application and at the same time promote their website and bring more Facebook traffic to your offers.
Facebook is the biggest social media network with members of over 100 million. That is a lot of members and that number keeps increasing by the minute.
So it really is in the best interest of its users to take advantage of the application to build their business. Some business both large and small has used the power of Facebook traffic to build their business and have received some rather startling results.
What makes the Facebook business page so unique and powerful is that it allows its members to post their content on their walls. And they give you full control over the way your content will be viewed.
Using the power of the Facebook traffic to get to your website is really just about getting people to become your friend. All you do is to do a search on your keyword for your business. Then you find people who have an interest in that keyword.
Once you have found those people, you will get a button that ask if you want those people to become your friend. You will go ahead and request them to be your friend. That is the awesome power of social media network.
Once you have those people as your friends, you will go out and join groups. The reason why you want to join groups is that you want to hone in on the Facebook traffic of the owner of the group. The owner of the group would have spent time trying to get a large list of friends.
All you want to do is to post your content on their wall. Once you do that, then your content become viral because it will be shown on all the members of the group wall, this will bring you tons of free Facebook traffic.
Then you will build a Facebook business page so that you can have people coming to your fan page and liking your content. But your fan page must be linked to a website or blog that also has good content that is relevant to your audience.
Understanding the value of a Facebook business page and how it can help you propel your social media network strategies is very important.
The Facebook Platform has created a whole new market for online games and start ups such as the Social Games Network (SGN) and Zynga. I wrote about developing Facebook Applications a while ago as a overview of my experiences. Some of my apps are games and some are not – I’m a game developer so I prefer making games.
While going through my blog traffic data, I saw search terms specifically about developing games on Facebook. That leads me to believe that someone is looking for information about that. I have some of that knowledge to share!
I generally make games for Facebook using Flash and ActionScript. There really isn’t a good way to make really interactive games using web languages and Flash is fairly powerful for 2D casual game experiences. You can find a list of the Facebook games that I’ve made or had a hand in from my developing Facebook Applications article.
There are basically three real games on that list: FlipCup Challenge, Sam’s Solitaire, and Sheep Tycoon. Sheep Tycoon is by far the prettiest because there was a real artist on that project – the other two I just slapped some art together to get the game out quickly. I’m not really an artist.
Using Facebook API From Flash
Figuring out how to best make calls to the Facebook API from Flash was one of the first things we had to deal with. In Sheep Tycoon, the high score table shows up in the Flash part of the game opposed to FlipCup or Sam’s Solitaire where I just did it in PHP. There are a whole bunch of Flash Facebook API’s – I didn’t like any of them.
The solution we came up with is to make a 0×0 iframe – basically invisible – on the canvas page and load a PHP script that would do all the Facebook API calls. So, if we needed to add a new high score to our database, we would load the script in the invisible iframe. This works for sending notifications or doing any sort of Facebook API call.
Getting the Friends
Although I didn’t find doing this all that complicated, I did see a search term for it in my traffic data. The easiest way to accomplish this is to just get the user’s friend ID’s in PHP and then passing it into the game using flashvars. I don’t see many cases where the user’s friend list will change while the game is being played. Once you have the friend ID’s in the game you can do whatever you want with it. We used it to show the list of your friend’s high scores in Sheep Tycoon.
The game takes the friend ID’s from flashvars. When we need to get the high scores, we pass the same ID’s to our PHP script that does all the database work and then returns the data in XML form for Flash to read.
Dealing with High Scores
You can display the high scores inside the game or you can display as a PHP page. I will generally opt to do the latter because there are less steps involved. PHP will get the data and display the data while Flash has to call a PHP script to get the data and then display it. However, displaying the high scores as part of the game itself is a better experience.
The semi-tricky aspects with high scores is how to record them and assign global ranks to each player. I’ve used time as a tie-breaker for scores that are identical. If you got the score first, you will stay above the person who got the score second. MySQL has been our database of choice and you can use ORDER BY with more than one field so it would be: ORDER BY score, time.
In FlipCup Challenge, each user has a global rank that is determined by their high score. This rank changes as players get new high scores. Updating everyone’s global rank every time someone managed to get a new high score didn’t seem like a good idea.
Firstly, to calculate the global rank, I figured out the number of rows that had a score higher than the score we are looking to get a new rank for. With that information, we’ll know that the rank will be something lower than the row count. We then find all the scores that are the same as the score we are using and then determine where it fits in there. With those two pieces of information we can calculate the right rank.
In order to make sure the scores are correct when anyone goes to look at the Scoreboard in FlipCup, we also update the ranks of all your friends when your rank changes. Global ranks are also recalculated every time you view the Scoreboard page. This will ensure that all the global ranks will be correct when someone is viewing it.
I’m sure there are better ways for determining global ranks than this but, for FlipCup’s purposes, it works fine. The main objective was to make sure the pages loaded fast so the code had to do the work quickly.
Experiment
Game development on Facebook is still in infancy. I’m not aware of many sites dedicated to providing information about games and Facebook. The games themselves are still rather primitive as most don’t really tap into the potential of social networks. I believe social networks are a powerful tool that can help spread new games and game ideas.
I have not looked much into development on the “new” Facebook even though I have switched to it and my links above point to the new Facebook. My apps are still working fine so I am not too concerned. The marketing and growth of apps are going to be affected. The chance of a Zombies-esque app proliferating is very unlikely in this new environment.
I will continue to create games for Facebook and other social networks. There are some ideas I have floating around – some of which I am working on. Experimenting with different ideas is the best any of us can do as this is a new road to travel.