Dudes, here’s the thing. When I was first starting out on this Facebook game making business I had no idea how complicated things would get. It’s like no one told me about this side of flash programming. You can’t just google and forum lurk your way into wisdom. You have to go deep, like 5+ sub links deep. Is it because most social games are run by companies who don’t want to share their secret sauces? Yes, maybe. Companies are evil like that.
Not me. I’m a friend. And I want to share what I learned. Partly because I’m a good person and don’t want other people to suffer like I did, but mostly because I want to get other (read: smarter than me) people’s feedback. Disclaimer: I haven’t made a successful facebook game (yet) and some of the things I’ll write about are things I didn’t do but totally should have.
Making a social game is different from making ordinary for-flash-portal games. Way different. For a typical flash game to be profitable, it has to be distributed to as many portals as possible. So it is common wisdom that you should put everything on a single .swf file, otherwise the portal people are going to hate your guts for making their lives miserable. Try to do that for your social game, cram 250+ animations of houses and racially diverse avatar skins and “save this cute lost puppy” dialog popups and you have yourself a slightly less heavy MMO client. And look, databases! And server queries! And user metrics! And Facebook credits!
It’s more like making web apps really. You provide them a service: you free them from boredom. The customers/players pay you to keep tabs of the data they generated from your app/game. This is similarities are uncanny for spreadsheet style games.
So I think I will be writing about how to make games as apps. And here is a list of random topics I might write about:
- Optimizing loading time
- Dynamic asset loading
- Efficient asset pipelines
- Vector caching
- Continuous integration
- Transacting with real money
- Connecting to social graphs and APIs
- Virtual spaces
- Logging user metrics
Btw, I use flash (as3) and php because I don’t know other languages.
Code.NgInaMo 
One response to “A Poor Person’s Guide to Making a Facebook Game: A Intro”
[…] Challenge, accepted! I am going to work on this game some more using garage indie resources and methods and prove to the community that the social network platform is perfectly workable and is a very exciting place to work on. I have decided to keep the development of the game as open as possible with hopes that others can learn or get inspired by it. Seeing that I am already planning on making this guide. […]