With the advent of Facebook game development platform, a new platform for online gamers has evolved. Game development on social networking sites is not a new concept on the social media platform. Sites like MySpace and others also offer online games for social media game enthusiasts. When it comes to Facebook game development services, most of the Facebook game developers rely on ActionScript and Flash. These two programming languages are favorites with the developers since there are not many efficient languages to make interactive games. Some of the popular Facebook Gaming apps that have sustained from the beginning and are very popular with the users are:
· Sam's Solitaire
· FlipCup Challenge
· Sheep Tycoon
There are multitudes of Flash Facebook API's, which you can use to make Facebook online games. However, many developers refer to go for PHP over Flash. With PHP, you can make an invisible 0x0 iframe on the canvas page in order to load a PHP script to call all Facebook APIs effectively. This is extremely handy to make the database dynamic. For example, if there is a new highest score, you just need to load the script in the iframe. This goes equally well with making any Facebook API call or sending notifications.
The next step will be to get your friends on Facebook. You can easily do it by getting friend IDs in PHP and passing it through the game by using flashvars. There is hardly any chance of changing the friend list while the game is on. The method is simple enough. Once the friend’s id is added to the database, you can do whatever you wish to do with it. Many game developers use the list to show the high scores of their friends. For example, Sheep Tycoon works this way. It shows all high scores of the players with the list.
Many developers cannot decide whether they should display the high scores inside the game or in a separate PHP page. However, most of them prefer the latter, since it is an easier and faster approach. The more tricky section is recording the high scores and publishing them globally for each player. MySQL is the most favorite database of the Facebook game developers. You not only can record high scores, but also can order them according to your wish such as time, score etc. One major issue with managing the high scores and global rand is calculating it first. There are various methods of doing that. For example in FlipCup, the database updates the ranks of the players when any change takes place. Global ranks are recalculated on the Scoreboard page.
Game development on Facebook is gaining popularity with each passing day as more and more businesses are realizing its potential in terms of creating brand awareness. Many skilled developers are trying their hands in this technology in order to take it to the next level. If you too want to reach out to your users across the globe, visit Evon Technologies, a mobile game development company and get a free quote now!
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