You are currently browsing the monthly archive for December, 2008.
Happy holidays from the J2Play team, we wish you all the best in the coming year and looking forward to improving our network to best suit all you game developers out there. In the mean time enjoy another appropriately themed game for the season that just got added to our network, just click on the screen shot bellow.
X-Mass
Last week we had a major UI update, this week we followed it up with another essential improvement for any application, loading speed. We’ve proudly cut the time it takes to load the whole wrapper from the time it takes to click on the link to the time the game loads to 9-11 seconds on firefox and IE, so now everyone can start enjoying their games faster than before.
This update has it’s share of UI updates as well to support our Modularization efforts as well as improve speeds. This is mostly visible the lower part of the social wrapper visible in the screen shot bellow.
Modular UI
Each feature is now an independent container that loads it’s content on demand. Initially all the features are collapsed except for the “Game Chat” module. The look is a lot cleaner that before and users can open and close the modules as they please. This modular look also achieves the main goal of focusing the users more on your game than what’s going on around it.
A new feature, Rolling Challenges, was introduced to Quick Poker. We all like to play challenges, but our friends like to take their time responding to anything we send them including messages and in this case challenges. Wouldn’t be nice to find the other person who wants to play a round of challenges right NOW, well with the new rolling challenges feature you can do just that.
Quick Poker Quick Challenge Mode
Here’s how the the new Quick Challenge mode works in Quick Poker. Simply click on the “Quick Challenge” button, the platform will either grab the last created challenge for you to reply to or creates a new challenge which will be picked up by the next person who clicks on that button. This way you get to challenge real people instead of the computer AI, level up faster in Quick Poker, and finally get nice emoticon that shows the players emotions for the hand their playing instead of the dealer image. Can you figure out if they’re bluffing or being honest. Give it a try yourself and play quick poker by clicking the image bellow, and invite a few friends to the game as well while you’re at it.
Quick Poker Emoticon
We had a pretty eventful year and just wrapped up the year with a major UI and performance update as well a constant stream of new features to help you, our developers, succeed in this new distribution channel. It’s been a pleasure working with you all and please keep the games coming! Looking forward to seeing your games in our network, if you don’t know where to start please head over to our developer wiki. More exciting updates and features will be coming your way in the new year, happy holidays from the J2Play Team.
This week J2Play rolled out major update to our social wrapper as well as a lot of new social features. The profile tab, sidebar, mini profiles, and game icons saw major updates this week as well as some graphic updates to our existing ratings and notification systems.
This release saw a major overhaul of the profile tab both aesthetically and more importantly functionally. The previous profile tab was a static summery page, the new profile tab has many new browsing as well as community features. Users can now browse through all the badges they’ve earned not just the recent ones, see all the games their friends play not just the top 10, browse through the summary of all the challenges they’ve played.
New Profile Page
The biggest improvement to the profile tab is the new Wall feature. Now players are able to comment on each others game wall and see their latest activities in the J2Play Games Network. A native feed is sent to the social networking site when someone writes a comment on your wall.
New Sidebar
The second major widget to get updates on the UI is the chat bar on the right side of the social wrapper. We’ve simplified this widget by a lot, the whole chat bar is now tab driven. The first tab contains the list of all your J2Play friends and gives you the option to invite your Facebook friends to the current application. The second tab is the Chat Room tab, where you can chat with all players who are online at the moment. Finally, Opening players profiles will open up a new tab in the sidebar. Also mouse over current status of any player on the sidebar brings up our new game card.
New Mini Profile
The new mini profile in the sidebar shows a summary of the players profile including badges info, challenge info, and a short list of some of their friends. Players can also view the users wall and comment on it, as well as engage in private live chat with that person.
New Game Card
Mosue over game icons anywhere in the social wrapper now bring up the new game card. This game card presents users with a quick summary of the game including it’s full title, ratings, genre, and total number of plays the game has received.
The Santa Express
We’ve announced a partnership with a great casual game company Jenkat Media this week, and in the spirit of the holiday season we’ve released their first game with us The Santa Express I encourage you to check this game out and see if you can beat our highscores. You can read the full press release of the partnership here.
The advantage of using J2Play is that you don’t have to worry about the social features as we update our platform all your games receive these updates and keep your applications fresh and relevant, there’s no cost for maintaining your social networking applications. If you haven’t released your games in your system yet, now is a good time to get started, head over to our developer wiki to get started now!
The blog entitled Challenges API was a brief introduction to the challenges feature. For those of you who aren’t familiar with this feature, basically it allows players to challenge each other to beat their scores, the advantage of the feature is that the players don’t have to be online at the same time and respond to the challenge when they get around to it. This week we’ll go in depth about how the feature will benefit your games, show how you can quickly design this feature into your game, and go over a couple of games that are taking advantage of this feature. The challenge mode is a fully packed feature specific to J2Play that helps pull more people into your game, provide new discovery and distribution opportunities.
Getting the online users to come to your game is crucial to making your game more popular and in return generate more revenue. By implementing the challenge mode you automatically get a friend bar selector, your game will show up in the challenge tab, “vs.” icon shows up in the chat bar, native notifications and feeds get sent to Facebook, as well as challenge notifications in the J2Play network. These 7 features pull more users into your game, provide new means of distribution and discovery. Lets take a close look at each one.
Friend Challenge Selector
The friend challenge selector bellow the pre-game ad encourages users to invite their real Facebook or other social networking site friends. The friends get a native notification on the social networking site to complete the challenge, this provides the game with new means of discovery and a new distribution channel (distributing through notifications) for your game.
Challenge Center Tab
Adding challenges to your game adds the game to the “Challenge Center Tab”. This tab has three rows, the first row is the game selector and your game icon will now show up in this row, and if the player is currently in your game the game selector will default to your game. The second row allows players to invite their real friends to a match whether they have the game or not. Finally, the third row shows all the current online players for a more real-time action, which also provides a mean players to meet new players in new novel way. The rest of the tabs on the top keep track of the challenges, sent, received, and challenge results.
vs. button in the sidebar
The “vs.” icon in the sidebar is activated when a game has the challenges mode. This feature provides the means for players to pull in the online players to your game, by simply challenging them to a new game. Also this is nice way to chat up new people online. Instead of saying hi, send them a challenge and you instantly have an excuse to talk to them. Could this be the game equivalent of sending drinks to new people you want to meet?!
Now that we covered the numerous discovery and distribution benefits the feature provides, how can you add this feature to your games? The first step is to design the mode for your game. The simplest form of a challenge mode is challenge by highscores. In this mode the first player picks a friend (handled by J2Play’s challenge selection methods described above) they play a round of the game and send the challenge along with the score they achieved, the second player receives the challenge and completes it. Who ever gets the higher score wins the challenge. That’s the basic idea behind challenge by highscores, trying to beat other players score. To see this in action try any of the following 5 games:
 Quick Poker |
 Daily Linguo |
 Smashing |
 Daily Sudoku |
 UFO Joe |
Just click on any of the icons above to check the game out and try the challenge mode for your self. In Daily Linguo, Smashing, and UFO joe the player is assigned a highscore after each round and the second players has to beat that score. In Daily Sudoku you have to beat your opponents completion time of the same puzzle. Finally, in Quick Poker you have get a better poker hand than your opponent.
Get started on implementing challenges for your games. This feature wont be possible without social networking sites providing access to their users, so take advantage of this unique feature designed specifically for the social networking platforms and make your games more engaging and take advantage of the new discovery and distribution mechanisms. All the technical information on how to add this feature to your game is on our developer wiki click here to get started Now! Feel free to contact us at developer@j2play.net for technical support regarding this feature.
