Facebook has created a new market for online games and start up, such as social gaming networks (SGN) and Zynga. I wrote about developing Facebook applications, but rather as an overview of my experiences. Some of my applications are games, and some are not - I am a game developer, so I prefer making games
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while going through my blog traffic data, I saw search terms specifically on the development of games on Facebook. This leads me to believe that someone is looking for information about it. I have some knowledge to share!
I usually make games for Facebook using Flash and ActionScript. There is not really a good way to really interactive games with Flash and web languages is quite powerful for 2D casual game experience. You can find a list of Facebook games that I've made or had my hand in the development of Facebook applications article.
There are basically three real games on that list: FlipCup challenge, Sam Solitaire, and Sheep Tycoon. Sheep Tycoon is by far the best because it is a true artist on this 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 best to make Facebook API calls from Flash has been one of the first things we had to deal. In Sheep Tycoon, a high score table shows the Flash part of the game against FlipCup or Sam Sam where I did it in PHP. There are a whole bunch of Flash Facebook API - I did not like any of them
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The solution we came up to 0x0 iframe - basically invisible - the canvas page and load PHP script that will do all Facebook API calls. So, if you need to add a new high score in our database, we will load the script into an invisible iframe. This works for sending notifications or doing any Facebook API calls.
Home friend
Although I have not found anything that complicated, I see the search term for that in my real podataka.Najlakši way to do this is to just get a friend of the user ID in PHP and then it goes into the game using flashvars. I do not see many cases where users friends list will be changed while the game is being played. After the friend ID in the game you can do whatever you want with it. We used it to display a list of friends high scores in sheep Tycoon.
The game is a friend ID is the flashvars. When we need to get high grades, pass the same ID in our PHP script that all the database work and returns data in XML format for Flash to read.
Dealing with High Scores
You can view high scores within the game or you can view a PHP page. I will generally opt to do the latter, because there are fewer steps. PHP to get data and display data, and Flash to call a PHP script to get data and then display it. However, the show high marks as part of the game itself is a better experience.
semi-tricky aspects of the high scores is to record them and assign global ranks each player. I have time tie-breaker for the results of which are identical. If you've got to score first, you will remain above the person who got the results to others. MySQL is our database of choice, and you can use ORDER BY with more than one field, so it would be: ORDER BY result, during the
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In FlipCup challenge, each user has a global rank that determines their high score. This act is amended as players get new high scores. Updating every global ranking every time someone managed to get a new high score did not seem like a good idea.
Firstly, in order to calculate the global ranking, I realized the number of rows that a result greater than the result we are looking to the new order. With this information, we know that the act will be slightly lower than the line count. We then find all the results are the same as a result we are using, and then determine where it fits in there. With these two pieces of information we can calculate the right to act.
To make sure the results are correct, when someone goes to look at the scoreboard in FlipCup, also update the ranks of all your friends when rank changes. Global ranks are also recalculated every time the view Scoreboard page. This will ensure that all the global orders will be correct when someone is watching.
I'm sure there are better ways to determine the global ranks of it, but, for the purposes FlipCup, for fino.Glavni goal was to ensure the site loads quickly, so the code is to work quickly.
Experiment
game development on Facebook is still in its infancy. I am not aware of the many websites dedicated to providing information about games and Facebook.Igre themselves are still quite primitive and most do not really exploit the potential of social networks. I believe that social networks are a powerful tool that can assist in the dissemination of new games and game ideas.
I have not seen much in the development of the "new" Facebook even though I switched to it and my links above point to the new Facebook. My application is still working fine so I'm not too zabrinut.Marketing growth applications will be pogođeni.Mogućnost zombie-esque app propagation is very likely 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, because it's a new road to travel.
