It just keeps going , and going , and going.....
GemJump is an arcade infinite bouncer / vertical infinite runner title released on both iOS and Android platforms and the first title I have released with FunWall inc.
On this game I received the opportunity to do a little of everything , some gameplay programming , UI implementation , analytics and other 3rd party SDK integration , Also for the first time I had a hand in selective some of the sound effects in one of the published titles I worked on . My Game Designer was impressed with my selection which of course made me feel great .
However my biggest contribution was Implementing the facebook SDK into our game , the attached friends score comparison component which included some database management , and essentially helping to make sure gemJump felt like a more social and competitive experience among players and their friends .
I wrote the functionality and constructed our very simple ( yet pretty) tutorial dialog
I wrote most the logic for originally spawning the collectible Items above the gem platforms as well as created the generic collectible items , and pulling them from an obstacle pool. I also worked on the inventory management , purchasing , and consumption / usage of the two Items displayed on the bottom of the screen . the GoGoGreen and Shield respectively.
As I expressed earlier FaceBook integration was probably my most major task out side of the core game . It was pretty heavily incorporated into the core social aspect of GemJump. We used a combination of the Facebook SDK and Player.IO's BIG DB manager to authenticate and manage our player data . I got a first hand look at writing and implementing code to sync a player account across social media platforms and make it universal across different mobile devices.... I know riveting stuff !
Here is our base Facebook Panel , encouraging players to log in
Once a player has successfully logged into FaceBook we can request a list of their friends who also play GemJump. Once we've received that list we save the players info to our Database on PlayerIO , and we also look at the ID's of all their friends we know play GemJump and then cross Reference between the friends we know also play GemJump and the ID's we have stored in our database . Once we have the final list of friends who play GemJump and those who have data in our database We render these player Objects with their picture and name . This was the first game I had the chance to do this in and I thoroughly enjoyed the learning experience. Featured are a few of my friends and somewhere to the right is my own picture.
HERE I AM ! With a remarkably poor score compared to everyone else ( even my test account to the left has a higher one) . Once we view the levels , we order the players by score and display a nice little tweening animation based on their position in the sorted scores list. For the player currently logged in we apply that lovely little Golden Yellow highlight at the bottom and for players in First place( Far ... Far ahead of me) We display a pretty medallion to commemorate their awesomeness among their friends .
Possibly the coolest integration of friends scores using faceBook and Big DB is seeing the live view of your friends scores in-game so that you can relish the joy of being better than them over and over again ! OR come to the realization you'll never top their scores . I didn't right the logic for displaying this info here but it does utilize the same data we Retrieve from our databases in a fun way .
How Do we get our friends into the game? by sending a Facebook Invite of course ! This required a little bit more work on the facebook developer console side but It was again one of those cool first time integration things I got a chance to cut my teeth on.
The last major task I worked on for the game was integrating this data merge dialog and functionality. Essentially once a player logs in with facebook we store their data to our databases. Whenever we log in and authenticate a user we look at the current data on the device and the last saved data . That way users can play across multiple devices and still always have access to their latest progression data .... In this picture I would overwrite my old data . 62 coins can be difficult to gather .
