iPhone Game Development - Chris Craft [92]
Today many companies and brands are setting up pages on Facebook and elsewhere. If soda companies have fan pages on Facebook for their products, why don't you? Even Facebook does this. For example, not only can you install the Facebook developer application, you can become a fan of it, and you interact with both the Facebook developer application team and other fans. Again, you can do all of this for free, and without having to set up or provide any of the infrastructure.
Summary
Now that Facebook Connect is available for the iPhone, you can integrate the power of the Facebook platform into your iPhone application. Users of your Facebook Connect iPhone applications can share their experiences with their Facebook friends. Users know that their private data is still safe and secure in your application even though they may not know you.
In this chapter you learned how you could build community for your iPhone app creations using the Facebook Connect API. First you covered the basics of what Facebook is and what it offers members and developers. Next you looked at how to get started developing for Facebook and Facebook Connect.
You reviewed the Facebook Connect iPhone sample and then tackled creating a Facebook Connect iPhone application from scratch. You also learned how to create a Facebook application that runs inside of Facebook itself. You used the application to create template bundles for publishing stories to user feeds. You learned the details of the FBSession and FBLoginButton objects. Then you learned how to directly access the Facebook Platform API from your iPhone application using Facebook Connect.
Users have come to expect to be immersed in great experiences on the iPhone, but now they want to be able to share those experiences with their friends. Facebook has provided a great tool for developers to use to make this happen with Facebook Connect. We have only begun to see what is possible today. Go to http://appsamuckcom to send us a note and show us what you've done!
Chapter 7: Connecting Players in Real Time
In This Chapter
Facing the challenges of real-time multiplayer games
Understanding game design: Competition
Choosing your connection options
Hooking up with your peers
Programming: AmuckPuck
Analyzing business aspects
We could have covered multiplayer apps in a single chapter; however, the technologies exposed in the 3.0 SDK warrant two separate discussions. In this chapter we focus on peer-to-peer (P2P) connectivity. Real-time games are well suited to this technology, so our example game will employ peer-to-peer and head-to-head connections. In Chapter 8 we will cover push notification. Even though push notification was not designed for gaming, it makes a perfect fit for turn-based gaming. It's important to cover peer-to-peer first because you will be able to use what you learn in this chapter to add peer-to-peer connectivity to your turn-based games.
In this chapter, you'll examine multiplayer connectivity in the game AmuckPuck. Air hockey has been a hit on the iPhone, probably because it is such a natural fit for the device. We cover it here partly because of this natural fit and the great illustration it serves for this material; however, it's also one of our personal favorites. We are hoping that you will take this example and build some really cool new versions of air hockey that we can all enjoy.
Finally, since there are already so many versions of air hockey currently available, we will consider how to make a game attractive in a replacement market, adding some value and separation to this app for it to be a success. From a business aspect we will discuss entering a replacement market and review techniques for making your games stand out in the crowd.
Facing the Challenges of Real-Time Multiplayer Games
Simply stated, multiplayer games allow more than one gamer to play in the same game environment at the same time. In this environment