UrZoo Developer Diary: Zoo Sharing & Cloud Storage (pt.1)

By Will Bolam: Lead Programmer

As lead programmer on UrZoo one of the new challenges the code team faced when creating UrZoo was how to let players share their zoos with their friends. Previously, working on games like Eat Them! and Savage Moon, we had created online features like high scores tables and achievements, but not done anything as complex as sharing a player-created world with another player.

The first part of the task was to work out how players would find their friends. We had already used OpenFeint on previous projects and found it to be a great bit of software for implementing high scores and achievements. OpenFeint also allows its users to have friends and so at first we looked into using OpenFeint friends within UrZoo. Whilst this was really easy to setup and get working within our game, one major problem we had was that despite most of us in the office having an account with OpenFeint, none of us had any friends on their system. Ideally we wanted players to have a full list of friends from the moment they start playing UrZoo.

With this in mind, we asked the question ‘What system does everyone already have friends on?’ – the obvious answer was ‘Facebook’. Facebook provide open source SDKs for a few platforms including iOS (see http://developers.facebook.com/docs/guides/mobile/) so we downloaded the iOS SDK and got to work writing code. Once we had the Facebook SDK integrated into UrZoo we could log in to Facebook and access friend lists within the game. We also added the functionality to post messages to friend’s walls, although we intend to use this sparingly and only with the player’s permission! One of our complaints from playing some of the existing social games out there was the amount of posts we ended up making about the game, so we have no intention of forcing players to post in order to progress.

With this implemented, we were able to create a screen in game showing the player all of their friends on Facebook (see screenshot). Now that players had their friends in game, the next stage was to let them visit their friend’s zoos! All will be explained in the next article.