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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.
One of the standard ways to get new users introduced to your app is Profile Boxes. Each application on most social networking sites can have a profile box that users can add to their profiles for other visitors to discover. J2Play has ramped up their Profile Box support and now added it to All social sites , including Facebook, Bebo, Hi5, Myspace, Orkut, Ning, and Friendster. What do you have to do to get this feature? NOTHING, Profile Boxes are now another free automatic feature that all games get by just adding the game to our network which takes around 5 mins.
- Facebook Profile Box Big
The big profile box for Facebook as shown above, displays the game icon, shows the number of challenges waiting for you in the game, your personal highscore, other friends who have this game, links to other games to keep the virality going, and finally the most important feature a “Play Now!” button to get new users to your application.
- Facebook Profile Box Small
Facebook has two different profile box sizes. The smaller version contains the same info minus the game picture and the game links, but maintains all your game related stats and the all important “Play Now!” button.
- Profile Box in Hi5
The profile box is optimized for each social networking site. Above, is an example from Hi5 which shows off the opensocial sites profile box design.
The second automatic feature added this week is the code free/feature free feeds. Previously to get some automatic feeds you had to add some features to your game such as leaderboards, although this is HIGHLY encouraged, we now have an automatic feed that comes with our basic codeless/featureless integration, by just adding your game our network. The following games have taken advantage of this feature:
 SP Trainer |
 Stunt Pilot |
 Plant Cruncher |
 Robo Kill Trainer |
 Dog Fight |
 Dog Fight 2 |
Basic Automatic Feed
Most games fit into our social wrapper just fine and get to take advantage of our chat bar on the side, but few games have fine text and their dimensions don’t fit well within our platform, for these few game developers we have added a full width feature that allows their game to take advantage of the full width Facebook provides. An example is Robokill, and Action RPG game, where the menus and text would not be as visible if the game is re-sized to smaller format.
Robo Kill in Full Width Mode
In summary developers now get Profile Boxes and Automatic Feeds for more virality, also they can use the full width of Facebook for the few games that really need it. Finally you are still encouraged to take advantage of our more advanced integration features such as Leaderboards and Badge to increase your engagement and virality.
One of the most addictive, viral, and engaging features in social games is challenges and we have just refined our challenge APIs to make the features more engaging and viral than ever before. First lets have a brief overview of the engagement and viral features that accompany this feature, followed by an overview of Challenges APIs, and finally how you can quickly make add this feature to your game.
Common tasks on social networking sites include browsing profiles, sending each other messages, commenting and tagging photos. There’s one thing in common between all these activities, they’re all asynchronous, meaning both parties don’t have to be online at the same time for it work. Challenges brings this concept to multiplayer games. People can enjoy games with their friends even if they’re not online. This asynchronous interaction adds another level of engagement to your games. J2Play has integrated this feature deeply with our platform. A new leaderboard automatically gets added to keep track of users wins and losses, which adds another reason for players to continue playing your game. Players can even bet credits on a challenge to raise the stakes and make the game more interesting.
Betting on Challenges
Your game will become more viral by adding the Challenges feature within our network as well as on the social networking sites. Here’s the summary of the additional viral features you get:
- Game shows up in the Challenges Tab
- “VS.” icons is enabled in the chat bar to bring more people to your game
- Challenge Selection Pane added bellow the pre-game ad
- Challenge Notifications sent to user to bring them back to the application
- Result Notification sent to players
- Challenge result Feeds posted to users walls
And my most favorite feed of all Challenge Winning Streak Feed. This shows your friends how good you are in a game, and encourage them to come and beat your winning streak.
Winning Streak Challenge Feed
As illustrated by the screen shot above I’m undefeated in Reversi so I encourage you to come find me online and put an end to this. 
With challenges mode you give users a reason to switch to your game and this results into a pre-game ad view, which increase the revenue generated by your game as well. People can also challenge their friends who don’t have the game installed yet giving you another opportunity to increase your user count.
Any game, even single player games can take advantage of this feature. If you’re already keeping track of a highscore you can add the simple challenge by highscore mode. Where one player initiates the challenge, plays a round, send the challenge to a second player, they play the game, and who ever has the highscore wins the game. Some games that are already taking advantage of this feature are Daily Sudoku, Daily Linguo, and Quick Poker.
Daily Sudoku Challenge Mode
The API is very straight forward, the challenge creation aspect of the process is handled by J2Play, so you can focus on just writing the code to handle the challenge mode in your game. Add challenges to your game NOW by going to the wiki documentation.
One of the activities we all enjoy on social networking sites is playing games and usually the games that let you share that experience with your friends are the most popular ones. Building the technology that allows game developers to create this social experience is a lot of overhead work. J2Play has created a Social Games Platform that allows flash and PC game developers to quickly add social features to their games with minimal work and socialize their games. Here are some highlights of the platform.
I) Auto-Port and reach audiences across 9 different social networks including:
 |
 myspace |
 hi5 |
 iGoogle |
 bebo |
 orkut |
 friendster |
 meebo |
 Ning |
II) Quickly add 7+ social features to your existing game with no additional code:
 Friends List |
 Chat |
 Credits |
 Profiles |
 Notifications |
 Ratings |
 Comments |
III) Take advantage of Viral Marketing Channels with no extra work
- Your game will automatically generate Feeds
- Your game will automatically generate Notifications
- Invite feature will automatically get added to your game
- Automatically get Profile Boxes
IV) J2Play adds 12+ Viral features to your game automatically
- Become part of the growing J2Play games network for even more ways to get discovered
- J2Play games network has natural non intrusive viral discovery features specific to games
V) Quickly add an additional 5+ engagement features to your game with a few lines of code including:
 Leaderboards |
 Badges |
 Challenges |
 Feeds |
 Multiplayer |
VI) Make Money
  |
Ad Revenue |
|---|---|
| Get 70% of the around and pre game ads displayed by your game |
We’ve been working with a lot of great flash game developers that have taken advantage of the flash toolkit, here’s some example games that you can try out today. Fancy Pants is a single player game that added many social features such as leaderboards, and badges to optimize the gameplay experience for the social networking crowed. Another great example is Daily Sudoku which uses our challenge feature, anyone can add this feature to their existing games to make it more engaging.
PC Developers such as Large Animal and Alawar have been taking advantage of J2Play’s PC toolkit to bring their existing PC titles to a new distribution channel, the social web. Alawar so far has released 3 PC titles including the highly addictive Sprill game, you can try this game today. Lego Bricktopia is Large Animal’s first foray into PC downloadble games on social networking sites.
Finally for developer who qualify based on the integration level of their games they get up to $500 of advertising around social networking sites to kick start your user uptake.
You can get started today and socialize your game. Our developer wiki walks you through the whole process you get started now! Feel free to contact me for additional questions or technical support at developer@j2play.net. Looking forward to seeing your games in our platform.
J2Play recently launched the first and only PC toolkit that allows all PC game developers to publish their games on all major social networking sites, including: Orkut, Facebook, MySpace, Hi5, Friendster, Bebo, and iGoogle while taking advantage of the unique offerings of these social platforms. Up until recently taking advantage of the social networking platforms has been an exclusive club for web games, but the new J2Play PC Toolkit is opening up the platforms for PC Developers.
J2Play PC Toolkit extends people’s social networking accounts to PC Games, where all their friends and achievements gathered on all J2Play enabled games travels with the user and is accessible to them from the game itself. So people can chat with their friends, invite them to challenges and even play web games directly from the downloaded PC Game.
Try the two PC games, Robocafe, and Bricktopia, already integrated with the J2Play technology today. J2Play worked closely with the independent game developers GameDevGuys, and Large Animal to release these first two games. You can get started today as well and be one of the first PC Game Developers to take advantage of Social Networking platforms and release your games to a whole new audience. Get started now, click here!
