Once I had decided on what my application was going to be, it was time to think of a theme. ‘’Non-modern’’ was the only theme my war game currently had. I used to play a game called Tribal Wars, which was an online browser game similar to what I was aiming for with my Facebook game.
I was a bit tired while thinking this due to watching some episodes of Lost the night before. Since this was the case, I decided that I should make it a tribal warfare game based on a desert island. Due to my lethargic state I also had a mental block when trying to think of a name for the game... eventually settling on just ‘Tribes’.
I ran through the Facebook Application Developer and tested a few things, it seemed easy, especially how it was sold before you signed up. Once I was in though, the amount of fiddling needed just to even get anywhere near to a launch was baffling. This did not include all the editing I would need to do to add items, stats, etc to my game to make it even do anything at all.
So I read through the documentation, added items to my game’s inventory, statistics for the player’s armies and copy and pasted a whole load of links between different parts of my Facebook setup in order to get it ready for launch.
This took more time than I expected. Maybe I was a little too hopeful, as I expected a ‘tool’ to do a lot more of the work for me, and also thought a ‘template’ would have a lot more pre-defined content than I found in this one while developing my game.
Eventually, all was done and I was ready to launch my (beta bug-filled) game.
