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!

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.

You can even customize the look and feel by uploading your own graphics. Check out one of our latest games like Veggie Snake or Whac A Pal on Facebook to see what you can do!

We also have a brand new and shiny start page that will give you an idea of where we are going. Even more improvements are on the way like more social networks (Oops! I didn't say that).

We would love to hear your ideas, questions and challenges (and praise, of course). With your help we can do much better! Our feedback page is just one click away.

Get all this benefits now by joining the Platogo Community. It's FREE and easy.

Upon many requests from developers and gamers we decided to loosen the publish restrictions for games on Platogo. Previously, games had to have a level-editor which excluded a good deal of great games that wouldn't fit into the scheme of level-creation.

Now we accept ALL games (that are family-friendly and have a high score integration). Tataa!
The first games making use of this are already online. Check out the unique & very refreshing coign of vantage by our friends at bobblebrook and the very addicting L.A.2 by well-known indie developer Kenta Cho.

Stay tuned! There's more great stuff that we'll announce soon. (maybe around the GDC *hint*)

Just a few weeks ago we started experimenting with the integration of one of our games into Facebook. Quick progress was made and we already have made a few fans. Our conclusion: giving all our fellow Platogo developers the opportunity to easily publish their games on Facebook without any changes.

What does this mean for you gamers out there? It means that in the not too distant future most Platogo games will be available on Facebook too. But one step at a time: Right now we have two games online for testing purposes – Whac-A-Pal and Veggie Snake.

Below each game we have a score- and achievement board to make it easy and fun to compete with your friends. Expect more features soon.

Check out two screenshots of the current version:

Compete and play with your friends

You are instantly notified when you win an achievement

Of course we are constantly trying to improve your Platogo experience on Facebook and we would love to hear your feedback in our forums. Additionally we've started a survey to make Platogo the best place to play together online.

Go for the win!
By the way: There's a new chance to win. This time the prize is the award-winning indie game World of Goo. Check it out on our Rising Star Contest page.

During the development of one of our new games for Platogo we got our hands dirty with Adobe´s Pixel Bender technology. In short, Pixel Bender is a technology to create programmable effects that run fast. They can be used for Flash, Photoshop and After Effects. You can create awesome effects with just a few lines of code. As a simple example we tried re-creating Apple´s Genie Effect for windows closure.The current implementation only needs 10 lines of code and is not even optimized. If there is interest we will post the final animated effect including the Pixel Bender Code in a few days. So don´t wait any longer, download the Pixel Bender Toolkit, install Joa Ebert's Eclipse Plugin (PBDT) and try this new technology by yourself.

[Update]

Because of the massive response we have implemented a little example and also added the source of our Pixel Bender Kernel to the blog entry.
There are a lot of possibilites to improve performance and we are looking forward to your input. The principle behind the Kernel is pretty easy. We´ve used a bezier curve to decide which pixel has to be transparent and where we´ve to compress the pixels. That´s all the magic.

To hide the window in the box just click on the close icon.

Pixel Bender Kernel Source Code: Download Genie Effect Pixel Bender Kernel

[/Update]