Fling a Thing brings physics-based game to Facebook

Fling a Thing, developed by Canadian company Big Blue Bubble, is a physics-based game that has previously seen some success on iOS and Android devices. Its Facebook incarnation is one of the first games to be released under 6waves’ new focus on publishing rather than development.

Fling a Thing says almost everything it needs to say about its gameplay with its title. Players have a Thing, which they must Fling — in this case, at floating, moving bubbles which seem to cause the Things some degree of offense. This is achieved by clicking and dragging on the Thing’s tail to pull it back and aim it in a particular direction, then releasing to fling it into the air and hopefully bring down some bubbles. The Thing will bounce off the sides of the screen but is also rather strongly affected by gravity. Each fling consumes a life, and when the player’s lives are depleted, the game is over, though completing a level rewards players with additional lives, as does collecting special “+1″ powerups that occasionally float onto the screen.

Fling a Thing currently has 30,000 monthly active users and 2,000 daily active users. Follow its progress with AppData, our traffic tracking application for social games and developers.

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The Facebook Platform Roadmap in 2012

For Facebook, 2012 will be the year of the third party app. News, videos, and songs streaming down your newsfeed are just a “small taste of overall vision,” said Carl Sjogreen, director of product management for Facebook at the Inside Social Apps Conference.  The focus for the coming year will be on enhancements to Open Graph, mobile and games.

Facebook recently reinvented the user profile as a timeline of major life events rather than a static “about me” page. The social network also extended the Open Graph platform for third party apps to include things like Spotify playlists on users’ tickers, newsfeeds, and timelines. Said Sjogreen, the apps are “a way for you to tell your story and to discover new things.”

Each of the activity streams serves a different function. According to Sjogreen, Timeline and Ticker are on opposite ends of the spectrum. “Timeline takes everything in your life and make it digestible,” said Sjogreen, and focuses on a user’s general interests and hobbies. “Ticker and Newsfeed are much more about what’s happening right now.”

In particular, Timeline favors apps with longer-term engagement, like Spotify, where users can say something like, “Hey, I listened to these artists the most this month using this app.”

With games, Facebook can take activities like high scores and other achievements to populate users’ newsfeeds while they play. On Zynga’s “Words with Friends,” for example, players can share their highest scoring words or the words they play most often.

Because games are inherently social, Sjogreen encourages mobile developers to create Web-based rather than native applications in order to make them available to more users. “I want to play ‘Words with Friends’ with my mom,” he explained. “I don’t care what platform she’s on. If I can’t play with her, it’s not a useful application to me.”

Facebook is working on making it easier for developers to integrate their apps with Facebook using a single API. Right now, said Sjogreen, “We are trying to figure out which [connections are] going to be the most meaningful for developers, and which we are going to want to build richer experiences around.”

Added Sjogreen, “Games are a shining example of how Facebook integration and social design can really be transformative for an industry.”

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Raptr Social Gaming Network Launches New Reputation System

Raptr is an interesting beast.  It’s been around for 5 years now and has always promised to integrate the social elements of games into one place.  It sucks in your XBox Live, Playstation Network, Steam, Google, Facebook and Windows Live accounts into one seamless chat, and lets you assemble a meta-profile that you can share with friends.  The feather in the cap, though, is that once you’ve done that, you can add video games to your profile and track achievements that you’ve gained in various games.

Raptr has just released a new gaming reputation system designed to measure a user’s skill in the games they play.  Gamers are able to upgrade their ranks by playing games and getting achievements.  This new gamification certainly amps up the competition at the social network and highlights the fact that there still is no leading hardcore gaming social network.  Raptr is certainly trying, as is Steam and even new players like OnLive, Raptr and GFace.  There’s a lot of potential in having a social network dedicated to highly competitive complex games — if only as a place for dedicated gamers to take reprieve from the onslaught of casual gamers on Facebook.

About Raptr, CEO Dennis Fong said:

“Earning ranks gains more than simple bragging rights,” said Dennis. “Our goal is to leverage a user’s gaming persona to make their experience better, via giving them an outlet to show off their accomplishments, discover more relevant content, or earn rewards simply for playing games.”

Gamers will start as “newbie” and advance all the way to “elite” if they are in the top percentiles in time played, achievements unlocked and other factors.  Benefits for being an Elite may include real rewards, although that program will be developed in the coming months.

A list of new features are given below, so if you’re a hardcore gamer head over to Raptr and give it a shot.

• New, dynamic user profiles, interactive charts, and genre maps
• A percentile-based ranking system that tracks a user’s hours and achievements and compares them with the rest of the community.  The ranks are as follows: Newbie –> Amateur –> Experienced –> Dedicated –> Hardcore –> Elite
• Social leaderboards to see how a user stacks up against friends
• Highly targeted and personalized news feed that delivers relevant content based on a user’s game collection, rank, most recent activity, and progress in a game
• Real rewards as users rank up in the games they play

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Social Gaming Summit - May 2012

The second annual Berlin Social Gaming Summit is a two-day conference focused on the intersection of mobile gaming, immersive worlds, and social networking. Given that social games raised a record $807 million in funding last year, it's no surprise that game developers are scrambling to devote more energy than ever to building compelling social interaction into every game they create. Likewise, with the mobile app market predicted to top $38 billion by 2015 and the global total spend on virtual goods expected to reach $4.1 billion by 2016, the stakes for mastering the business and technology of successful social and mobile games has never been higher. Social Gaming Summit unites established industry leaders along with emerging start-ups in free-to-play games, social networking, virtual goods and payments infrastructure for two full days of illuminating keynotes, lively panels and engaging discussion on the convergence of gaming and the social web.

Event Date & Place:
23-24 May, 2012
Kalkscheune, Berlin

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ContraVille? Konami Signs Up to Make Games for Zynga.com

There are no allegiances in gaming anymore.  There was a time when developing games for the Nintendo Entertainment System meant that you were strongly pressured not to make games for other consoles.  For me, I was on the Nintendo ship until they lost Square and Final Fantasy VII was produced for the Sony Playstation.  Well, these days platform creators like Nintendo and Sony have new competition in the form of Zynga and OnLive, and Zynga just recently announced that Konami, one of the largest console game makers in the world, will be producing games for their new Zynga.com platform.

The news was reported by Rob Dyer, the head of publishing at Zynga who’s heading up the Zynga.com platform, at GDC in San Francisco on Thursday.  In addition to Konami, Zynga has recruited Playdemic and Rebellion as well, and explained a few details of the payment process.  When using Facebook credits as most of the games use right now, these publishers will be getting 70% of the 70% of revenue that Zynga gets, putting publishers at receiving 49% of revenue from a sale on Zynga.com.

That said, games that appear on Zynga.com will take advantage of massive cross-advertising opportunities and will join one the fastest growing social gaming company on the web.  It may be a great long term strategy to join the network and make your games known to gamers as Zynga.com continues to expand and provide new offerings.  Inside Social Games points out that “Konami and Rebellion also make for strange bedfellows as both developers have little to no experience in social games.”  This is true of Zynga’s strategy at this point, and speaks to the fact that Zynga must be aggressively courting small game publishers right now to get them to join the network — it would be quite difficult to persuade even mid-size game publishers to join and give 30% of their revenue to Zynga.

We’ll see how things progress for Zynga.com, and whether they begin to mould themselves into their own social network in the future.  Are they attempting to go the route of something like OMGPOP?

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Is the PS Vita Really a Social Gaming Revolution?

Have you been keeping up with the portable gaming wars?  What once used to be the exclusive domain of Nintendo is now a rife battleground featuring the likes of Apple, Sony and even Google, and Sony’s latest offering, the PS Vita, is hoping to win some new fans in the space.  In a recent trailer for the device, they hail the PS Vita as a social gaming revolution — but is it?

The two big social services being launched with Sony’s new device are LiveArea and Near.  LiveArea allows users to explore a shared online ‘game space’ for a given game, where there are message boards, trophy comparisons and chat.  This is to easily enable gamers to play with one another.

Near is a location based service where gamers can find other gamers who are active in the area.  We may see this service grow in scope, but for now it seems quite basic, with the ability to give gifts to one another and chat. It’s not clear whether you can use the service to start a multiplayer game easily.  Check the trailer below for a list of all the features of the PS Vita, including LiveArea and Near.

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New RISK Facebook Game

I just got the news last night that EA had launched their newest social game, and it’s based on one of the most beloved strategy board games of all time: Risk.  The game, entitled RISK: Factions, takes from a recent version of RISK launched on XBox and PSN and adds a few cool social features that make the game speedy and competitive.  Our sister blog Inside Social Games had a great interview with the Producer of the game, and he talks about the sanctity of keeping a strong multiplayer element in the game.

Check out the interview here and let us know what you think of the game.  Do you like the player-versus-player aspect or would your rather stick to co-opetition titles like The Sims Social?

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Raptr Social Gaming Network Launches New Reputation System

Raptr is an interesting beast.  It’s been around for 5 years now and has always promised to integrate the social elements of games into one place.  It sucks in your XBox Live, Playstation Network, Steam, Google, Facebook and Windows Live accounts into one seamless chat, and lets you assemble a meta-profile that you can share with friends.  The feather in the cap, though, is that once you’ve done that, you can add video games to your profile and track achievements that you’ve gained in various games.

Raptr has just released a new gaming reputation system designed to measure a user’s skill in the games they play.  Gamers are able to upgrade their ranks by playing games and getting achievements.  This new gamification certainly amps up the competition at the social network and highlights the fact that there still is no leading hardcore gaming social network.  Raptr is certainly trying, as is Steam and even new players like OnLive, Raptr and GFace.  There’s a lot of potential in having a social network dedicated to highly competitive complex games — if only as a place for dedicated gamers to take reprieve from the onslaught of casual gamers on Facebook.

About Raptr, CEO Dennis Fong said:

“Earning ranks gains more than simple bragging rights,” said Dennis. “Our goal is to leverage a user’s gaming persona to make their experience better, via giving them an outlet to show off their accomplishments, discover more relevant content, or earn rewards simply for playing games.”

Gamers will start as “newbie” and advance all the way to “elite” if they are in the top percentiles in time played, achievements unlocked and other factors.  Benefits for being an Elite may include real rewards, although that program will be developed in the coming months.

Read More..
For more informations about Social Gaming Practice, Social Game Developers, Hire your Social Game Programmers, log onto http://www.dckap.com