How to socialise your single-player flash game as a Facebook app
22 Sep
Word Challenge by Playfish
So you’ve built the hottest flash game around. You see the millions of users on Facebook and Opensocial platforms. And now you want to make it social (so it spreads across the social network).
While this can be a slightly backwards way of creating a social game (far better to think what would I like to play with friends first) it can work as Playfish ably demonstrate.
Take, for example, Word Challenge – a one player game with 2.6 million monthly active users on Facebook alone. Let’s analyse their secret sauce
1. High Production values – this game looks and feels fantastic. There’s even sound…
2. Friends Leaderboard - this is evident everywhere – I know where I am ranked amongst my friends. I can compare weekly, monthly and all-time to keep it fresh.
3. Network and Global Leaderboard – for more skill based games you can also be top in the world or in your network.
4. Invite friends to play too – a dull but necessary function
5. Challenge a friend – I have a go and then you have a go – whoever gets the best score in the head to head challenge scenario wins. Used more than you’d realise
6. Feed stories on high scores – Toby has just set his highest weekly score on Word Challenge, he just set a new weekly top score of 1716. Play now to see if you can beat him
7. Feed stories on overtakes – Toby is moving up the weekly leaderboard on Word Challenge, he just passed Mike to gain the number 2 position this week. (other apps take this a step forward with actual notifications on overtakes)
So we see that with these techniques, which can be part of a container (contact Nudge for details of the GameFi container currently in R&D) you can convert your single player flash app into a successful social game.
Tags: playfish, social games
Hey check out my games portal through facebook, Tim’s Games.
http://apps.facebook.com/timsgames
While I consume the games from MochiAds, I built the site to integrate more with facebook by posting your high scores and game plays to your news feed, notifies the old high score owner if you take the all time highs score, shows you what your friends are playing and localizes high scores to just your group of friends, and more.
sometimes, puzzle games are addicting.
See this Crossword game in Facebook:
Crossword Fun
A new Crossword is generated on-the-fly with every refresh of the page! You can even find the names of actors/actresses just by looking at their photos.