Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
not a real-world answer. The best way to gain a Twitter following for your games is to
start by making something good, get people to your site using some of the other means
described here, and offer the ability for people to sign-up for your tweets on your site
(
www.twitter.com
offers many useful tools and APIs for doing this). However, once you
get some quality subscribers, Twitter might just become one of the best ways for you to
announce your new projects. Also, using a service such as Tweetmeme.com can help
you keep track of how many people have tweeted about your game.
Using the channels on Twitter is a very useful way to get your tweets into streams where
they would otherwise not be seen (channels are indicated with a hash symbol, #). Many
people on Twitter search for their favorite topics, and Twitter keeps a running tally of the
most popular channels. To get your tweet into a channel, simply add something like
#flashgame or #game to the end of your tweet. These types of channels are used by
people who play and make Flash games—just the audience you want to see your game.
Facebook
Ways of integrating your game onto Facebook comes in several flavors, which range from very
easy to very difficult.
The easiest way to go about integrating with Facebook is to post a link to your profile; just submit
a link to
www.facebook.com
that looks like this:
http://www.facebook.com/share.php?u=[url]&t=[title]
where
[url]
is the URL of your game and
[title]
is an HTML-encoded string that represents the
title of your message. Even though this method is very easy, it's also not very useful. Only your
friends on Facebook will see your game, and they are probably already sick of hearing about it
from all those tweets you've been sending out.
A better way to distribute your game through Facebook is to integrate with the Facebook APIs.
However, those API are beyond the scope of this chapter. You can learn more about
integrating with Facebook at the Facebook development web site, located at
http://developers.facebook.com/
.
Uploading to portals
Another way to distribute your Flash games is to contact game portals and directly upload your
games there. If you have a game that stands out, this can be an effective way to get your
games seen quickly. However, the effect still might not last as long as you would like. There
are two basic types of portals to which you can upload your games: social gaming sites and
selective portals.
Social gaming sites
Social gaming sites such as Kongregate and Newgrounds allow you to upload your games and
have them instantly playable by anyone else using the portal. Using these sites is a great way to
get instant feedback for your games and to get a few residual links back to your own web site. A
great advantage to these sites is that, with rare exceptions because of improper content, they
accept almost every game submitted.
