Talking about Facebook, Flash, Php and Tutorials.
You all should know Facebook. I think it would be interesting to integrate your Flash game into a Facebook application.
There are more options than you can imagine, but at the moment I’ll just embed a game, nothing more. Just remember there will be a lot more.
Obviously, first you have to have a Facebook account and be logged in
Then you have to install the Developer application.
From this page http://developers.facebook.com/get_started.php click on “Add Facebook Developer Application” and you will be able to start creating your own applications.
Once you clicked on that link, you will find a “Developer” item in the left nav button. This is your application control panel, where you can manage your applications.
Click on “Set up New Application”
You will be redirected to a quite unclear page with a lot of fields to fill… don’t worry, you will be out of this step in less than 2 minutes.
Just follow this picture:
Let me explain the most important fields:
Application name: This is the name of your application
Developer Contact E-mail: The email Facebook will use to contact you if there are any problems or important updates
User Support E-mail: Users will be able to mail you at this address
Callback URL: Very important, it’s the URL of the application on your server. That’s the place where you will write your application
Canvas Page URL: Another very important field… this is the URL of your Facebook application… the one you will share. It’s very importat than you choose an URL long at least 7 chars or you won’t be able to submit the form and you will lose all your previously inserted data!
Leave Use FBML checked. FBML stands for FaceBook Markup Language and enables you to build full Facebook Platform applications that deeply integrate into a user’s Facebook experience.
In four words, another language to learn
Application Type must be Website because we are going to embed a web game, and be sure to check Yes on Can your application be added on Facebook? to enable more options
Select Smart size on Default Iframe Canvas Size Option and check Users and All Pages on Who can add your application to their Facebook account?
Application Description: Write here how awesome is your game
Default Profile Box Column: Wide
Side Nav URL: write the same as Canvas Page URL
And you finished this step! You’ll notice you left a lot of blank fields, but at the moment we want to quickly embed a game into Facebook so never mind… you’ll learn how to fill the entire form later
Click on Submit and you will be redirected to this page:
Write down both API key and Secret values
Now it’s time to write some lines of code into your server.
From the Facebook resources page download the PHP (4 and 5) Client Library and uncompress it in the directory you specified in the Callback URL, then create an index.php file with this code:
require_login();
?>
Hello
Line 3: Don’t display errors. With Php4 I got a couple of warnings, so I decided to remove them
Line 5: Including the facebook.php file you previously downloaded from the Facebook resources page
Line 7: Creating a new Facebook class. Be sure to insert your API key and Secret values you wrote down previously
Line 9: Force the user to login and save his data on $facebook_account variable
Line 14: First FBML tag: fb:name renders the name of the user specified, optionally linked to his or her profile.
The uid attribute is the id of the user name you want to show. In this case, the one saved in the $facebook_account variable
The useyou attribute is set to false because I want to display the name and not “you”
Line 20: Second FBML tag: fb:swf renders a Flash movie
swfsrc is the absolute URL of the Flash movie
swfbgcolor is the background color of the movie
wmode specifies if the Flash movie is transparent, opaque or window. If you set it to transparent, you will override the swfbgcolor attribute
And that’s it!!! Now go to http://apps.facebook.com/jamag_game/ to play Jamag on Facebook.
What’s so interesting in this?
Well, first of all you created a Facebook application, and that makes you a Facebook application developer.
Second, and more important, Facebook passes some interesting parameters to the SWF when it is loaded… and could make your game viral… I am going to mess around a bit and write a new tutorial soon.
Meanwhile, don’t forget to play Jamag on Facebook
Never miss an update! Subscribe, and I will bother you by email only when a new game or full source code comes out.