Following my wonderful guide to make your Facebook game suck, I tried to see if my work helped someone, and I discovered that it did !
(Article originally published on my blog Reactoweb)
Here are 11 Facebook games I personaly tried over a few weeks in 2011, and a great deal of them followed at least 1 of the rules, which are in short :
Send e-mails, for everything, regardless of other mail settings
Treat your players as five-year old childs
Limit the player’s actions
Force users to post useless crap on their Wall to progress in the game
Make the game heavy, laggy and/or CPU-intensive
Crappy ads
| Game | Publisher | Rule 1 | Rule 2 | Rule 3 | Rule 4 | Rule 5 | Rule 6 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Dungeon Overlord | Night Owl Games | | | | No | | No |
| Lucky Space | A Bit Lucky | | | | No | No | |
| Lucky Train | A Bit Lucky | No | No | | No | No | No |
| Railroad Empire | Night Owl Games | No | No | | No | No | No |
| The Sims Social | Playfish | No | No | | | | No |
| Battle Pirates | Kixeye | | No | No | No | | No |
| Empires et Allies | Zynga | | | | No | No | |
| Adventure World | Zynga | | | | | No | No |
| Army Attack | Digital Chocolate | No | No | | | No | No |
| Edgeworld | Kabam | No | No | No | No | No | |
| TrainStation | Pixel Federation | No | No | No | No | No | No |
Of those 11 games tried, I only still played TrainStation after a few weeks. Did you guess it? I will tell you why in my next article.
Still, this table is not really accurate to show which games are really engaging. If the game follows many of the 6 rules, there is a good chance that you will not like it on the long run. But not following any rule is not a guarantee of enjoyability. Like every other video game, you still need to engage the player towards clear goals with smart gameplay and really rewarding achievements.
This table only shows the common flaws of Facebook-based game, but you still need to conceive a great game after avoiding those pitfalls.
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