Platogo Blog

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.

Now it's really easy for you to keep track of all your on-going challenges. Just click on the "Notify me!" button after creating a challenge, accept the e-mail permission request and we will inform you of your next victory.

Additionally, on multiple requests, we've added a search box to make it super-easy for you to find the one special person within your 524 facebook friends you'd like to challenge.

There are a couple of other small improvements like the ability to brag about your victories. Challenge your friends now!

We have received a lot of positive feedback on Platogo's layout and design in the past. However, our change of direction (from an online gaming portal to a service provider for game developers) also required to rethink the layout of our website. As a result, we decided to do a step-by-step revision of our design in order to better meet the needs of game developers.

You may have noticed that our startpage has already changed some weeks ago. Today, we launched the redesign of the Developer and Edit Game Area. The new Developer Center contains a bunch of entertaining texts on Platogo's new features and benefits. It's definitely worth reading! Concerning the Edit Game Dialog, we managed to replace the rather complicated, tabbed overlay by a clearly arranged page including all the information needed. Just log in and try it out!

In the next few weeks, we will continue with the redesign of the remaining pages. Please be patient with us, as we are still a small team with a busy schedule.
By the way - one thing that will definitely remain, are our lovely Platogo mascots!

Any feedback on our new layout and content is highly appreciated, we would be happy to hear from you!

We are proud to announce the release of challenges – our latest & greatest feature. Challenges allow users to send their scores to friends for competing. Finally you'll be able to answer the big question: who among your friends is the better player?

Game developers get this great functionality without having to lift a single finger. Our Social Bar will automatically enable users to send challenges based on the scores they've submitted recently.

This means that every Platogo game published on Facebook has support for challenges from this very moment on! Try challenges for yourself and see if you can beat your friends in a head-to-head competition.

We've had a hard time concentrating on work ever since we had a playable version of the challenges system implemented. We've been too busy trying to beat each others' scores. =)

Just a week ago we launched our Facebook Wrapper and provided you with tools to publish your games on Facebook easily. Now it's time for you to finally earn some money with your finely crafted game.

Add buyable items in your Platogo backend. Then you can start selling in-game items and upgrades to gamers with just one line of code.

     PlatogoAPI.microtransactionService.buyItem( "tunnels", 1, buyItemHandler );

That's all there is to it! Gamers can now buy items directly within your game.

To be notified when a gamer buys an item from the shop, just add a callback:

     PlatogoAPI.registerBuyItemCallback( buyItemHandler );

For more detailed examples please have a look at our API Documentation:
MicrotransactionService.buyItem
PlatogoAPI.registerBuyItemCallback

If you have any questions, ideas or problems please use our feedback forum. We love to help!

Jakob and Florian are attending this year's Game Developers Conference and Flash Gaming Summit in San Francisco and would be glad to meet up with developers who are interested in bringing their games on Facebook.

We will wear our legendary blue t-shirts so we'll be easy to spot
Feel free to drop us an email at hello AT platogo DOT com to arrange a meeting.

It's a great time to be a player and developer at Platogo!
We've listened to you and we are now bringing more games to Platogo by putting more effort on providing tools for game developers.

If you are a game developer, read on because we have excellent news for you.
You can now enhance your flash games with social features and bring them to Facebook easily using our wrapper.

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Hi! My name is Nuno Marques and I'm the new member of the Platogo family (second from the right). I'm going to talk a bit about myself and how I got here in Vienna. I'm originally from Portugal, of a small city, north of Lisbon, called Leiria.

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