A big grats to Robbit who won our second weekly competition with his game Continue!
Robbit is now $500 richer!
Both Robbit and last week's winner, Scriptedfun, have a good chance of winning this month's competition. Check out the leaderboards here if you want to know who's in the lead.
We're pleased to announce that our Multiplayer API is now freely available.
We want to thank everyone who participated in the beta for their valuable feedback.
We will mail out the API package shortly to everyone who signed up for the beta, both those who got in the private beta and those who didn't. We just want to make sure there are no major oversigts in the package before we mail it out to a lot of developers.
If you are impatient or if you didn't participate in the beta, you can now head to our download section and get the first public release version of the Multiplayer API. The package contains the API files, the local development server, an empty template game so you can quickly start developing your own multiplayer game, and the full source code for the games DrawPad and Fridge Magnets that should provide you with inspiration and examples. We have also released a full online documentation for the API which you can find here.
Congratulations to ScriptedFun!
Our first weekly competition is over and the developer Scriptedfun is now the happy winner of $500 for his game Trappit.
You're awesome man!
If you want to know who is likely to win next week's competition or this month's big competition, check out the contest page for the latest leaderboard.
Hi guys,
In todays release, the biggest new feature is Forum Search. Now you can find all the forum posts you didn't even know you wanted to find.
Have fun :-)
Today is a very special day for us.
It's the first time we get to talk publicly about something we've been working on for a long time; Our Multiplayer API.
Everyday, lots of new flash games are made and released, fuelled by the fact that it doesn’t require much more than a computer with Flash and a good idea. However almost none of them are multiplayer, even though everyone knows they’re more fun. Multiplayer is a part of almost every new traditional computer or console gaming game released today, yet it’s curiously absent in flash games.
We started wondering why.
If you want to make a fun game, making it multiplayer should be much easier than spending all the time and effort required to make your singleplayer game interesting over a long time. Being able to play a game with your friends makes it inherently more fun and increases the replay value dramatically. Also, the format is perfect for it since it’s so easy to share web-based games with your friends.
When we tried developing our first multiplayer Flash game we quickly realized why there are so few of them: It’s really, really hard.
You have to either purchase server software, trust a piece of open source software, or build it yourself - preferably something that doesn't send huge messages back and forth encoded in three layers of xml. Then comes figuring out your protocol, management of multiple games, persistence of data, lobby creation, sockets, multithreading issues and so on. When you've finally got the thing running, pretty much your only option is renting your own server somewhere or running it from your basement. And even then, you've still got to play server administrator 24x7 to make sure the thing is always running.
That's pretty soul-crushing, when all you care about is gameplay. All the other stuff should be a commodity, an off the shelf service, like web hosting, email, or ads.
The Nonoba Multiplayer API is exactly that service. We've abstracted away all the difficult and boring parts of multiplayer games, so the Flash developer need only create the part that’s really important: the gameplay.
Any Flash game developer can download the API, develop the game locally, and upload it to Nonoba for hosting, and still be free to embed it and upload it everywhere else.
We could go on for ages describing how well it works for turn based as well as realtime games, how games are completely isolated and protected from one another, how the protocol is optimized to squeeze the bits, how it easily integrates with our other APIs, how much thought has gone into the development cycle, and so on. In the end though, what we're most excited about is to see what new innovative multiplayer games will be created.
We are so confident that we're on the right path with our Multiplayer API, that we will kick start the development and get the word out by announcing our first big game competition with $20,000 USD in prizes, and a first prize of $15,000 USD, for the best new game built on the Multiplayer API.
Can't wait to play your games.