Platogo Blog

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

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

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.

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!