Welcome to the web wrapper to wrap them all!
IGX SDK
Hey fellow game developers. I’ve spent the best part of this last year researching, analysing and developing games for the Facebook Instant Games platform. Whilst it has been incredibly fun it has not been profitable, in fact I have lost a lot of money. Even so I still have faith in the platform and I do believe that one day it will come through for indie game developers trying to break through.
With this in mind, I’ve spent the best part of the last month working on something interesting and useful that I hope Facebook Instant Game (IG) developers and web developers alike find useful, hopefully encouraging more game and entertainment app developers to come to the platform, as well as give existing developers another way to monetise their instant games elsewhere.
Now I’ve explained the inspiration behind the creation, I will explain a little more about it.
I have created an open source layer called IGX. This is an SDK that has multiple purposes:
- Bridges the gap between Facebook Instant Games and the web, allowing Facebook Instant Game developers to deploy their games to web and monetise them with little to no changes
- Enables web game developers to include support for Facebook Instant Games before deploying to the platform
- Enables all developers to use a common API which allows them to deploy their games across many web portals and provides common game services
- Extend the IG platform, providing new features via other services
What is IGX? It is basically a complete replacement for the FBInstant object, so you can drop it into your code instead of linking to the FBInstant SDK CDN and your game should just run outside of the IG platform. IGX is based very heavily on two concepts, services and vendors. A service is a feature such as login, payments, ads etc, whilst a vendor is the provider of a particular service. For example, PayPal is a purchasing vendor. Note that some vendors provide many services, for example Xtralife provides user management, leaderboards, back-end storage etc..
You have some minimal setup to carry out depending upon which services and vendors you use, but once set up your game will deploy to that specific platform using all of its features.
Note that not all features of the Facebook Instant Games API are supported but most are. Take a look at the Github repo for more details. Also don’t forget to check out the Wiki.
Note that IGX is still very heavily in development so new services will be added over time. If you find a service that you would like adding then please get in touch with the details.
A new version of Booty5 the free HTML5 game editor will be released in due course with full support for IGX and easy deployment.
Join the IGX SDK community on Facebook.