BUILD | GUIDE
GUIDE: IPHONE SOCIAL PLATFORMS Want to connect your iPhone game to the world? There’s a lot of choice out there, says Ed Fear…
ypical: like buses, you wait for one iPhone social platform SDK to come along, and then two do. Or, by our caculations, eight – but we’ll bet there’s even more hidden from our steely gaze. If there’s one thing that Microsoft’s managed to get right this generation
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it’s the online service: Sony was in catch-up mode for at least two years just to reach the same feature-set of its competitor. It proved that people want to know exactly what their friends are playing; that they wanted to be able to organise sessions easily; and they wanted to be able to communicate
with each other even if they were in different games. It also proved that with just a few simple challenges (or, in this case, Achievements), developers could increase the stickiness and even desirability of their games, while giving players the ability to show off and brag about their mad skills.
SCORELOOP
CRYSTAL SDK
DEVELOPER Scoreloop GAMES Astro Boy, Pee Monkey, Parachute Panic PLATFORMS iPhone, Android PRICE Free CONTACT Via website
DEVELOPER Chillingo CLIENTS Guerilla Bob, Mission: Deep Sea PLATFORMS iPhone PRICE Free CONTACT Via website
Scoreloop’s Core Social is one of the less immediately popular social platforms, but given the recent expansion of the service onto Android devices – with the same feature list as its iPhone brother, and the promise of cross-platform
Astro Boy: Flying Action is one of Scoreloop’s higher profile integrations
Achievements are just one of the features Crystal promises
www.scoreloop.com
www.crystalsdk.com
challenging – that could be set to change. What’s also interesting is that the platform is touted as a white label service, so that you can integrate the features into your own interface rather than bringing up a separate (and often branded) screen.
OPENFEINT
44 | FEBRUARY 2010
Chillingo’s entry into the iPhone social platform space looks like it’ll be one befitting one of the market’s biggest publishers – although ‘looks like’ is pretty much all we have to go on at this point. All the features you’d expect are present – challenges,
leaderboards and achievements, plus a simple Unity integration path – but, given that the service launches in its first games just this month, it appears as if they’re only accepting selected partners for now. Still, with Chillingo at the wheel it’s bound to be popular.
PLUS+
DEVELOPER Aurora Feint CLIENTS Fieldrunners, Space Invaders: Infinity Gene PLATFORMS iPhone PRICE Free CONTACT Via website
Possibly the best-known iPhone social platform – and certainly the most popular one that’s not tied into a publisher – OpenFeint has won support for good reasons: easy integration (it takes 19 minutes, according to the documentation),
So it’s no surprise that iPhone gamers want a similar thing, but the lack of a unified network is a distinct problem, and can make it hard for developers to pick from the many options available. We’ve rounded up four of the most popular to give you a guide to their differences.
DEVELOPER Ngmoco CLIENTS Worms, Charadium, iCopter, Eliminate Pro PLATFORMS iPhone PRICE On request CONTACT Via website Fieldrunners was one of the first games to incorporate OpenFeint
Eliminate Pro is one of the flagship titles for ngmoco’s Plus+
www.openfeint.com
www.plusplus.com
support for saving to the cloud, ingame chat rooms and forums, plus cross-promotional opportunities and help with upselling free users into paying ones. Real-time multiplayer support is also promised, although is currently in private beta stage.
Riding on the back of Ngmoco’s success in the App Store, Plus+ has already managed to receive a large number of integrations despite currently being ‘rolled out slowly’ although the company says it has ‘enormous plans’ that include
releasing an open SDK in the future. Those that managed to get picked for partnership can enjoy all of the usual jazz, including push notifications and access to Ngmoco’s ‘powerful metrics database and promotions engine’. Feel the power.