Animal Party hit the big 100k DAU and 800k MAU mark over the weekend! Inside Social Game interviewed Tommy Wu, my co-founder/CEO, for a few quotes. You can see the article here.
We’re now doing various optimization and content tweak for Animal Party while continuing ahead on our next title.
Animal Party joined the 6waves publishing network several weeks ago and we’ve been getting more traffic. We also transitioned our monetization strategy to use Facebook Credits as a in-game currency, which made us eligible for various Facebook promotion that brought in additional traffic. As a result, we broke 500k MAU for the first time since the game was launched!
Facebook Credits as a currency is definitely has both pros and cons. While Facebook provides a lot of additional user through their promotion channels, it still remains to be seen if the overall effect on revenue per user will be a positive one. Many smaller studio like Digital Chocolate have adopted that strategy fully, while bigger studios like Zynga and Playdom are still sticking to their own in-game currency. This makes sense, because bigger studios don’t really need the Facebook promotion since they already have a very large audience playing their existing games, and they can funnel traffic between their own games through cross promotion.
I just spent a few hours running down a gnarly bug that became an issue on production late last night. All of the FB.ui dialog calls began to fail on our website with a Javascript exception.
After much trial and error, I was able to determine that Mootools was the root cause. Without Mootools, everything worked. With Mootools – whether it’s 1.2 or 1.3.2 – this exception gets thrown:
Uncaught TypeError: Cannot read property ‘className’ of undefined
I will be working with Perry from Couchbase tomorrow to plan out our Webinar - Couchbase: Scale Overnight from Thousands to Millions of Users
The actual webinar will be take place Wednesday, March 30th, 9:00am. If you want to hear about how we use a key-value store solution to achieve horizontal scaling with almost no sysadmin effort on our game Animal Party, then check out the webinar!
The 2011 GDC took place earlier this month, and although I didn’t attend the actual conference this year, I read up on several of the session summaries and caught up with several of my friends in the industry. My biggest observation this year is how the developers view towards “social games” have started to change.
Last year, there were plenty of folks talking about how social games would become a fad, and games on facebook could not last forever. Folks talked about how there were very little innovation and the games produced were very shallow. Some even went as far as saying social gaming was one of the factor that put traditional gaming in a downturn. Personally, I found those claims untrue, except the bit on games being shallow – which I agree. I feel that the developers who said those things were the same developers that said Wii was a failure, and said it was never going to become a successful gaming system. They were the words of developers! Not designers. Not entrepreneurs.
After a few years of inactivity, I decided to bring back Walking Ideas as a game developer blog, and make the full version of Oshiro available online for free. Oshiro is a puzzle game that Rick and I built back in the days, and it actually started out as an actual board game. We still have a wooden prototype and a refined, plastic prototype sitting in our homes. Every so often, I still take them out and introduce folks to it.
“It’s actually pretty damn fun,” I always say to myself.
Now that I am busy with my social gaming start-up (TribalCrossing) and Oshiro has been removed from Shockwave.com, I figure I should just let all the puzzle enthusiasts out there give it a try. I managed to dig up the old source code and old level files from an old computer, and I should get the game cleaned up for everybody soon.
As for the blog… I think I’m going to start writing about my experience in the “social gaming” space, but I expect to eventually write more about ideas, observations, and thoughts on game designs in general. Overtime, I would like to build out a section that lists many of the “party game” or “real-life social game” ideas that I’ve tossed around with many of my designer friends over the year. The idea behind that is to create a collection of unique games you can bust out next time you have some friends over.
So, Hello! And welcome.
Sending batch app-to-user request on Facebook
With the release of the “live game feed” on Facebook, game requests and notifications now gets their own real estate on the upper right corner of your screen. This immediately reminded me of the good old days of “notification war” on Facebook circa 2009. Applications had free reign over your notifications and many spammy apps went viral by abusing that channel. At Tribal Crossing, we created a populate polling app that reached 3 million MAU that was in part due to this powerful viral feature. Oh yes, everyone succumbs to the mystical power of the Red Bubble that screams CLICK ME.
Anyways, Facebook took the app-to-user notifications away, but now it has returned in a different implementation – a much better one IMO. So we plugged back into app-to-user requests so we can send user individual updates besides going through the application wall. Each notification requires a Graph API call, and it can take a long time to send millions of these requests. There is a batch API available, but there wasn’t any good documentation so it took me a bit of time to get it to work. Here’s the detail on formatting your Graph API calls to send batch app-to-user requests:
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