Even more awesomer since last time we spoke
As some of you know this year we've been pursuing investment funding. As of about a month ago this finally came through, we successfully raised over a quarter million dollars to turn Playtomic into something really big and awesome. We've got a ton of stuff planned for this year and the resources to actually do it now which is really cool.
A huge thank you to everyone who donated along the way, by the time we closed the investment funding Playtomic's bills were approaching $2000/month, your help kept Playtomic online and running over the last 2 years.
I'm moving to Argentina on Friday! There I will be opening the very first Playtomic office and hiring a bunch of cool guys and girls to work on Playtomic with me. If you're in that area of the world drop me an email, especially if you want to work on Playtomic - particularly after iOS, Android and .NET developers! This is going to be super exciting - for the last 2 years Playtomic's office has been my spare bedroom in a little house in a little country called Nicaragua, upgrading to an actual office and of course, more than me developing it is going to be a great experience for me, for the platform, and for everyone using it - over the remainder of the year Playtomic is going to grow to have 5 or 6 full time employees working on new features and supporting the platform!
The other day new builds went live for the AS3, Unity, HTML5 and iOS APIs. The iOS API was mostly bug fixes patched in by some guy in Russia, if you're an iOS developer feel free to contribute improvements as well because Objective C is not my forte.
The new APIs introduce the concept of an API Key so it's important you start thinking about securing your game if it's not already. I'm not sure what obfuscation/encryption techniques exist for HTML5 and Unity games but for Flash you should check out Kindisoft or similar if you haven't already. There's no pressing need to do so, but in the future this key will be used to authenticate your game for more stuff that might be more important. Right now it's just used to ensure someone else doesn't use your leaderboards/gamevars/player levels etc and to make sure inquisitive people can't trigger data being retrieved or created if they go to URLs directly.
A big part of hte new APIs was the addition of Parse's custom database service, now available to devs building games on AS3, Unity and HTML5 - if you're an iOS person then they can handle you natively through their own SDK. These custom databases are an awesome addition, you can use them for pretty much anything you want - user registration, surveys, feedback, error or performance logging etc. Through the APIs you can insert, update, delete and list objects so you have very flexible control.
Over the last week I've fixed a whole bunch of annoying problems including errors with the leaderboard interface, exporting levels players make, rollovers on countries, ranged and average level metrics and more, and tonight I'll hopefully figure out the (maybe only) big remaining issue that recently emerged with the leaderboards. If there are other bugs or problems or errors in the documentation or anything else don't hesitate to let me know by email (ben@playtomic.com), or if you're a Github user you can push fixes yourself to our account: http://github.com/playtomic. If there are features that don't exist that you think should, or that exist but aren't as good as they could be please let me know too. I'm always interested in how Playtomic can work and be better.
A big part of our strategy moving forward is on capturing the mobile game analytics market. We're a bit late to the game in mobile and their communities aren't tightly concentrated like the Flash ones, so we need all the help we can get. If you have a blog or a website please post about or link to us to help strengthen our position in search engines!
Barry from GamesChart tells me he has a ton of paid inventory, if you're looking for an additional way to monetize Flash games check them out. It's like a leaderboard-of-games in your game, and you make money when people click on the games.
Ben
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