Social Gaming

Subject: Social Gaming

• note: originally emailed 02/02/2012 and sanitized for public consumption
• sidenote: posting here so i can lead people here whenever they ask me about this stuff...

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I haven’t done any FB apps, but I just ‘made’ a FB app following some dirt simple instructions.

You can see it here:

• http://apps.facebook.com/nickshin_test_app/

The ‘app’ is actually hosted outside of Facebook:

• You can right click on (on the very right edge of the flash content and scroll bar, if you can) and see that it’s just an <iframe> (what Facebook is calling the canvas) pointing to the source of that asset.
• You should see it open to: (or if you are having trouble getting the right click menu button to show the browser menu instead of the flash menu)
• http://nickshin.com/fb/app/

So, getting stuff to show up on Facebook is easy.  The power comes when you want to do things like inviting/playing with friends, integrate with Facebook’s credit (payment system) and other features that tie into their API’s.

For example, to look yourself up on Facebook’s API system:

• http://graph.facebook.com/nickeyshin
• Replace ‘nickeyshin’ with your Facebook username

And using code facebook has provide at:

• https://github.com/facebook/php-sdk/

You can, for example, fetch all of your friends:

<?php
require 'facebook-php-sdk/src/facebook.php';

$facebook = new Facebook(array(
    'appId' => 'YOUR_APP_ID',
    'secret' => 'YOUR_APP_SECRET'
));

$me = $facebook->api('/me/friends');
/*
 * access all the information of friends
 * $me has the JSON detail of all the facebook friends of the current user
 */

foreach($me['data'] as $frns) {
    $id = $frns['id']; /* make the echo statement a little easier to read */
    $name = $frns['name']; /* make the echo statement a little easier to read */
    echo "<img src="https://graph.facebook.com/$id/picture" title="$name" />";
?>

There are much more terse ways to do this.  They are all found on Facebook’s developers docs:

• http://developers.facebook.com/docs/advancedtopics/

The following is where I got the dirt simple instructions from:

• http://devlup.com/programming/php/how-to-create-facebook-application-using-php-and-graph-api/1589/

So, to answer the original questions:

• To Build FB games:
• You can use whatever flash, unity or plain ol HTML assets you have.

• To scale FB games:
• FB punted on this and makes the developers host the content.
• So, you will need servers for the (static) pages.
• You will need more servers if you want to do things outside of the FB infrastructure.
• Like what? May be like a [super awesome] mechanism that FB’s systems doesn’t provide.

That’s all I got for a few of hours of research…