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.