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!)

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!

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.

(more...)

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*)

Last monday we had the chance to meet with the biggest & most important names in the online gaming business right now: Zynga, Mochi Media & HeyZap. We're great fans of all these companies so actually meeting them in person was exciting & awesome.

Mochi Media

Jameson Hsu & Justin Wong took some time off their busy schedule to welcome us in their cosy office. Their space is really nice - lots of cool little gadgets all around the place. Music was playing in the background which I never heard before (identified by Midomi to be the band Passion Pit). The song Little Secrets has grown to be among my very favorites - I'm listening to it on Spotify while I type these lines.

For well deserved breaks Mochi provides comfy couches placed in front of a huge TV with various consoles attached, also including a full rock band kit. Nice. I'm looking forward to their Flash Gaming Summit which is taking place on March 8th. Like the website says: The conference will bring together leaders in the Flash game space to share industry insights and strategies on successful game design, development and monetization.

Zynga

Next up was Zynga which is like the epicenter of social gaming at the moment. They are continuously growing, now employing about 800 people and still looking for more. Bret Terrill gave us a "quick" tour around the different offices. Quick is being put in quotes as their place is really huge! They even have an own Zen Room where employees can get acupunctures and massages. Great way to motivate their people - I know I'd enjoy a foot rub every now and then.

While wandering through their departments I think I caught a short glimpse of a top-secret project of theirs. However, after signing their NDA contract & everything, I sure won't break the news. I'm confident this will be another sure-fire hit though.

HeyZap

Jude Gomila, the co-founder of HeyZap, met up with us at Brainwash Cafe since they are just moving into their new office. He's a bright guy who thinks fast and talks just as fast. They have lots of ideas for the future of HeyZap and I can't wait to see where they're heading. Definitely an company to keep an eye (or two) on.

San Francisco has been an awesome experience. Prior to our trip we'd never thought that we'd have the chance to meet with so many interesting and well-known people. Think about it: these three companies are among the most relevant in the whole industry right now. And we were lucky to meet them all.

Seedcamp organized a week in the states to meet up with interesting people from all sorts of different companies. Being among the lucky Seedcamp winners we got to join the trip and, oh boy, what a ride it's been.

It started in New York where we stayed for a couple of days before eventually heading to San Francisco. The very first thing we did after arriving in NY was buying tickets for a comedy show with free drinks on the street. As it later turned out they were way overpriced and instead of getting free drinks we had to buy a minimum amount of 2 drinks each. Well, at least the comedians were funny.

The next surprise came when we entered our hotel room which more felt like a sauna. Apparently  the heating was broken and running at full speeds. The solution suggested by the hotel manager? Turning up the air conditioning to fight the heat.

Other than that New York treated us really well. We had the time to see some of NY's amazing sights: Central Park, Empire State Building, Brooklyn Brigde ...

Seedcamp New York

On Tuesday it started at Google Chelsea Market - a refurbished office building with old wooden floor elements, relaxed atmosphere and several coffee machines + candy dispenser in the cafeteria. After each team gave a 3min pitch, we had 30min mentoring sessions. It looks like the new concept of Platogo was well received in the USA.

At Brown Bag Lunch (event organized by Beta Works) at the Apple HQ in New York we ran into Charles Forman the founder of OMGPOP and we had a great and rather nerdy discussion about the future of casual / social gaming, the limitations of multiplayer games and more...

Day two started at Union Square Ventures with with Brad, Albert and Andrew talking about the difference between startups in the US (East Coast / West Coast) and Europe, values they are looking for in startups and answering questions.

After that we met Saul Klein's uncle Jonathan Klein the CEO of GettyImages, who founded the company 15 years ago. As the market leader they acquired 100+ companies within these years and still managed to establish values among their employees.

Our flight to S.F. was delayed but once we arrived with the rental car at our wonderful Motel at 3 in the morning, everything was fine ...

Seedcamp Silicon Valley & San Francisco

The next day a little boy's dream came true by entering the Google Plex for a really great event. We bumped into people like Pascal Finette, Catalyst at Mozilla talking about the future of the most used open source browser and other well connected people like Pietro Dova, ex-Googler and now business angle at XG Ventures who introduced us to Frederic Descamps. Frederic is the founder of a company called A Bit Lucky, working on next gen Facebook games - we met him on Saturday - he is a genius and perfectly connected in the San Francisco gaming scene.

We also took part at Startup2Startup, met Mike Arington from TechCrunch and had further mentoring sessions at First Round Capital. As for the whole trip - the advice was highly relevant for us and lots of great ideas popped up every time.

Values of Seedcamp

Once again, this trip really showed the values of Seedcamp - it is not just some money, it is the chance for a small company (from a small country) to visit and talk to people you would have never met without their help in such a short period of time. The great thing about these mentors is their advice and the access to their network of companies and startups  - and they always help you to connect.