Platogo Blog

In cooperation with Laola1.at, Platogo recently launched its first big mobile application for UniCredit, the official sponsor of the UEFA Champions League. The game has been developed with Unity (and Flash) and is freely available on the web, Facebook, iOS and Android.

Web: http://www.take-a-ticket.eu
Facebook: http://apps.facebook.com/take-a-ticket-eu/
Android: https://market.android.com/details?id=eu.unicredit.mkt.takeaticket2011at

Use Luís Figo's shooting power to destroy various constructions with your football and win tickets for Champions League football matches. You can take part from Austria, Germany and Italy. Good luck in winning those tickets!

We have been very busy developing during the last weeks - so today, we can proudly announce the launch of three new Platogo games. Needless to say, that all of them make use of Platogo services in order to be integrated into Facebook.
The two Flash games use the Platogo Wrapper to add social features like friends scores, challenges and achievements. The Ruby on Rails App has easily been built as a Social.io application.
Enjoy!

Nachts im KHM (Night at the Museum)
Flash Game for the Austrian Museum of Fine Arts

Explore the famous paintings of the Austrian Museum of Fine Arts with your pocket lamp. You can win annual passes for the KHM and tickets for special nighttime guided tours. The artworks change every week and you even have the possibility to compete as a team together with your friends. The game may be played on Facebook or on the KHM's website (with your Platogo login data).

Zipfer Frequency
Flash Game for Zipfer (Austrian beer brand)
Agency: Draftfcb Partners

Recognize your Facebook friends' profile pictures and defend your tent against strangers. You can win 100 tickets for the FM4 Frequency Festival 2011.

ÖBB Sommerticket (Austrian Railsways' summer ticket)
Ruby on Rails Facebook App for the Austrian Railways
Agency: Draftfcb Partners

While you're away with ÖBB summer ticket, it's open house at your parent's place! Show the community how hard mum and dad can rock! Upload pictures or videos of your old folks partying and vote for the best submissions. You can win VIP tickets for the Snow Break Europe 2011 and annual concession tickets for the Austrian Railways.

Long time - no see. You might have wondered already what happened to our blog. We were extremely busy over the last few weeks or let's say month . We are working on a completely new product called social.io for our most favorite customers - YOU the mighty social game developer. I can't tell you all the details yet, but the first games using this awesome technology will go live on MeinVZ and Facebook soon.

We are at the Festival of Games in the Netherlands right now and would love to tell you more about our new baby. Feel free to contact us on Twitter (@platogo, @ripcurlx, @trahfo) or e-mail (christoph[at]platogo.com, jakob[at]platogo.com).

Your Soci... Platogo Team

Platogo just released a new game, BusMeister, based on the Platogo Wrapper. In BusMeister players improve public transport service by applying tools such as bus stops, traffic signals, bus lanes, larger buses, etc. to a bus route. BusMeister starts simply by having players place bus stops evenly on a short section of street and gets progressively harder - in the last level players need to design a route for a blank street.

It supports all the features of the Platogo Wrapper (Highscores, Levels, Challenges, Achievements, and more). BusMeister is part of GreenCityStreets, a project designed to encourage people to learn about sustainable transportation and encourage them to get involved in improving their local transport systems. BusMeister teaches players about public transport so that they will be more likely to support controversial improvement projects such as bus lanes and transit priority.

GreenCityStreets also provides a forum where players can discuss real ideas for improving public transport in their cities and a best practices library where they can learn more about public transport. GreenCityStreets uses our new product social.io to create a platform about public transport for all people around the world.

BusMeister is the first game by GreenCityStreets. Once the game and forum are established, GreenCityStreets will add applications for other forms of sustainable transportation including biking and walking. Transport agencies and planning consultants can also use customized versions of BusMeister to help facilitate public participation in planning studies.

Today we want to announce some cool new features for our developer community:

• Digits: now you can set up scoreboards with digits, that means if you submit a score of 10025 with digits = 2, we'd display that value as 100.25 in the scoreboard
• Score Data: with every score that you submit you can simply attach a data object. In a racing game you could use that data to display ghost driver
• Unlimited scoreboards: now you can define as many scoreboards to your games as you want
• Export User Data: now you can conveniently export users data from the monthly and all-time scoreboard to CSV in the backend.
• Show in Socialbar: now you can specify which scoreboards should show up in the Socialbar.

We hope you like all those new features

Your Platogo Team

Now if that isn't quite something! Over the past six months our community grew from 5000 users to over 100.000 – more than 4000 of our users play on a daily basis. We don't necessarily like to pat our own shoulder, but in this case...

It goes without saying that we also want to give out a big "THANK YOU" to our partners over at www.szene1.at and Rediff, for helping making this possible.

And we want to keep it moving: While enhancing our user base we also enhanced our game portfolio – now more than 50 games can be played on Platogo, Szene1, Facebook and Rediff. Expect more in the near future!

You've never heard of Rediff? Though the site is still rather unknown, it is one of the most established sites within India. And they line up to become the biggest Social Network in that part of the world. Given that India has one of the biggest populations in the world, there's a enourmous potential for game developers. Platogo cooperated closely with Rediff to bring you, your games and millions of people in India together. We've set up an article in the Platogo DevCenter that shows you how easy it is to bring your game to Rediff.

Facebook recently simplified their developer dashboard. Therefore, we've updated the article on how to publish your Platogo game on Facebook to reflect these changes. Now it's easier than ever to bring your games to Facebook using Platogo.

Recently, we decided to loosen up our restrictions on ads in games that use the Platogo API. This means, that you as a Platogo developer are now free to use the 3rd party ads solution of your choice to earn money from ad revenues, e.g. CPMStar or Mochi Ads.

We will continue to display banner ads around the game but at the moment there’s no ad revenue sharing with developers. However, we think this makes things easier & more transparent for developers: ads in your game are and always be 100% yours.

Don’t forget, that there's good cash in item sales too! Use our built-in shop solution to further increase your revenue by selling virtual goods or game upgrades. You'll still get a fixed 70% of net revenue, i.e. transaction value minus transaction fees and taxes. (And yes, we're always pushing our payment partners to keep transaction fees as low as possible – it's in all our interests!)

We're proud to announce that there are several great, new games on Platogo. Play them now on Platogo or directly on Facebook: String'Em In, Drive 2, Kyobi, Contentric & Solitaire 2. Also, check out some of the Platogo classics that have recently been released on Facebook like Trapdoorer & train your brain.

In the meantime we've been busy rewriting our Facebook integration to fully make use of their new Graph API. After some nerve-wrecking days we're finally done with this refactoring. Luckily, as a Platogo developer, you won't notice anything different as it all happens behind the scenes. That's the beauty of our solution - integrate once & never worry about any changes. You know the saying: there's only one constant in software development - change.

Of course this is just the beginning. We're currently in the process of providing support for other social networks (the first addition will be available shortly). Our goal, ultimately, is to provide an abstraction for most of the popular social networks. Imagine: integrate once - run everywhere... =)

At Platogo we owe the Open Source community a lot. Our super core is a Spring based web application that runs on Apache Tomcat and communicates via BlazeDS to our Flash clients. Additionally we use lots of Open Source tools and libraries for our day to day work. As most devs of our company are already part of the Open Source community it wasn't a hard decision to start giving back tools and libraries we only used in-house so far.

We do 100% of our Java development test driven and also were able to successfully use this approach for our ActionScript projects. Luckily there are already quite a lot of great libraries available for ActionScript 3 like FlexUnit, ASMock, Hamcrest,... just to name a few.

Still there was one neat little library we missed quite a lot during ActionScript development -> make-it-easy. It's a tiny framework that makes it easy to write Test Data Builders in Java. Until today it was only available for Java, .Net and C#. So we decided to give it a try, spend a few extra hours in the office and ported it to ActionScript 3 as well.

You can download the latest version (1.0.0) from github http://github.com/ripcurlx/make-it-easy-as3.

Feedback and bug reports are more than welcome.