Forums » Games » Facebook game: Dr. Blast

My first attempt with ImpactJS (requires Facebook login):

http://www.facebook.com/apps/application.php?id=121129864634454

I must say, ImpactJS works like a charm. There may be a few quirks which I'll gladly report as bugs or suggestions, but it is intuitive to work with. One problem: I had severe issues with HTML5 audio (when there's lots of clips to play) both on Linux and Windows browsers, so I opted for SoundManager2 with hidden Flash for audio.

game is well polished, wow! the swooping sound made by the enemies was creepy, but I liked it!

definitely a five star effort here.

the audio was a blast ( great choice with SoundManager 2)

tested on FF4, MacOSX.

questions:
- was it a huge hassle implementing FB credits?
- for server side programming, did you use php, RoR or Python?

Thanks!

Server side is Python with Pyramid (ex Pylons) framework.

FB credits was not much of a hassle. Pretty straightforward, you have single callback url and three possible transaction states to cover (order placed, settled, settled confirm).

However, like all the other FB docs, and since Python FB SDK is old and pretty much invalid, we had a few wtf moments with totally wrong settings. Ie. the next state should be 'state' : settled, not 'next_state' as the docs suggest. Also, you need method and content vars, and put everything under content, in your callback response -- which is not mentioned in the docs. But looking at the PHP SDK we solved the problems (so I suppose the PHP SDK is valid and okay, dunno).

@Vlad: Do you mind sharing how you plan on making money off your game on FB? I didn't notice any ads that might benefit you; I only saw FB ads (I think... don't use FB ). BTW, I like your game. Very nice.

@ryan - it's paying for the full version of Dr. Blast. (20 credits at the moment i think).

@fugufish: Thanks! Missed that. Going to look now.

Yeah, we're trying the classic premium approach of one time fee. In-game paid items and such stuff is for more "hard core" games. This game is too casual to have such a model.

Cool, simple little game. It's nice to see something that is not scaled (having the retro pixel look), and is not a platform or space shooter (even though I like those too).

It looks like a Flash game that was converted, mostly because the art looks like vector drawings converted to PNGs. I looked at your sprites and found it interesting that it's one long horizontal PNG file with all the sprite images instead of a square shape. I hadn't thought of doing that.

Great sound and music too.

One criticism, I thought the game was too easy and difficultly did not increase really even after 14 levels.

Thanks for your comments!

The game is original for ImpactJS, there is no Flash version. The graphics does look vectorish because our artist prefers vectors and draws in AI. I even toyed with the idea of using AI -> Canvas conversion, but maybe for the next game to reduce bandwidth.

Sprites are all horizontal because of the way we exported them and stitched the frames together, especially for enemies which spawn in from the vortex, which is programmatically done with ImageMagick.

The game was somewhat easy, yes, but we adjusted the difficulty now that we got some input from the players (eg. health does not renew on level-up anymore).

Looks great, and nice to see it getting fans on facebook!

If I could ask, how did you set up your facebook app so that the user had to use http? When I try to set mine up it forces me to put in a https alternative too!

Nice job, Vlad. I covered Dr. Blast on HTML5 Grind.

Great review, thanks!

I covered my experience with HTML5/Canvas gained primarily during development of Dr. Blast in my blog post found here:

http://haronmedia.com/blog-post/6-the-adventure-called-html5-canvas.html

However, the issues have nothing to do with ImpactJS and I stand behind the quote in your review. :)

@MikeH - Facebook turns off the secure browsing temporarily for the app.

i think most (more likely all) apps on FB use http connections. This will cause a small message to the user before starting the app (i.e do you choose to turn off secure browsing to access the app?)

slight inconvenience, but it's a one time thing.

The problem with this is that as you disable HTTPS it remains disabled, at least that was the case several weeks ago.

You don't have to supply https canvas url for your app, but iirc FB will require these by September this year.

@Vlad did you say September? Could you provide the link to this news? Couldn't find it on the developer blog

My bad, it is October:

http://developers.facebook.com/blog/post/497

"All Canvas apps must ... and obtain an SSL certificate (unless you are in Sandbox mode)."

@Vlad - I just read the post... hmm any idea how to do the migration for a python based framework? I'm using django.

as of now, I do have my app setting to OAuth 2.0, and am using a signed_request for all communications

fyi,

i'm building my app based on the Run With Friends example made by the Facebook team. It's based on django + App Engine.
http://developers.facebook.com/docs/samples/canvas/

question: is this app HTTPS ready? ( i.e -> will I encounter problems on October 1st?). To me, it looks like this app fulfills all the requirements in the timeline.

as more proof, if you go to http://apps.facebook.com/runwithfriends/ with a fresh browser, do you see the "secure browsing" message by facebook? I didn't seem to get any , which is good news. Try it out and let me know.

hmm, the Run With Friends app doesn't run with HTTPS.... any idea how to enable this?

To have the app HTTPS enabled you need to purchase an SSL certificate for your app's canvas domain.

Additionally, it might be required to tell your app it is working under HTTPS so that any routing and redirection functionality knows about that.

I'm using Pyramid, deployed under Apache with mod_wsgi as backend to Nginx. With that I need to configure nginx for https and then take care of X-Forwarded-Scheme and other proxy headers when talking to Apache (because nginx -> Apache proxying goes via http), and configure Prefix middleware in the app in order to have the automatic routing and url generation aware of it.

Sorry but I don't have any direct experience with GAE so I can't help you there.