I am starting work on my next game. Actually, I already have the base version of the server side done (several thousand lines of Python running on Google App Engine).
So I was building a list of functionality required for the client. This is what I came up with:
The game (obviously)
Leaderboards at the end of each round like WordHero has.
Friends lists
Chat rooms
Achievements
Viral Recommendations
Virtual currency
Newsfeeds
I really don’t want to have to write (4) through (7) if I don’t have to. So I decided to look at the available SDK’s. The ones I found are:
Papaya
GREE (formally OpenFeint)
Scoreloop
SwarmConnect
Did I miss any ?
Only Papaya and Swarm have a chat room. They also both have a virtual currency, but I might actually want to use a currency implemented using one of the advert SDK’s (eg: Tapjoy).
Does anyone have any thoughts/feedback or experience with doing this ?
I am currently playing around with scoreloop. I like that you have control of how to implement it and such things. They need the “READ_PHONE_STATE” permissions, but that’s it, other Permissions are optional.
You can also use their ready-to-go-UI for fast implementation. Unfortunately that’s all I currently know about it because it is not live yet
You may take a look on apps which already implemented the different systems just to see how they do it and if you like they way it works.
Looking forward to some interesting posts about that topic
Up till now I’ve used OpenFeint, which honestly they suck. There’s frequent network problems and half the time users can even log in to the leaderboards/achievments. Even the official OpenFeint app on Play has tons of reviews about the network problems. I think they are more concerned with their Iphone sdk and don’t really care about android. Their help forum is like a ghost town, can’t find any answers to problems I’ve had with them. I will be switching to Scoreloop for my next game, I’ve heard good things about them.