Experiences with OpenFeint/Agon?

Unity Engine
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I’ve had experience integrating both into my Unity games, and I was wondering how everyone else felt about it, and if you could share your experiences, both during development and afterwards.

IMHO, I felt that atleast for me, Agon was much easier to implement into Unity/Xcode, but more difficult to actual use (tricker API.) OpenFeint is just the opposite. it was a nightmare getting it to build with Xcode, but much easier to call funcitons inside Unity.

I think Agon’s interface could use some work (clicking on user profiles, app discovery, etc). However, they just launched www.agon-online.com for displaying all Agon enabled games, which loosk amazing. The Dev Dashboard for creating and editing leaderboards and awards couldn’t be simplier.

OpenFeint’s iPhone interface looks really nice, has great profile features for finding and making friends, and the One-Touch Purchase is great for devs. OF has automatic display notifications for Achievements and High Scores, which, while is possible in Agon, its really difficult to pull off properly if your an iPhone Basic user. However their current external site for finding OF enabled games really lacking, with no API’s for displaying leaderboards or the such as Agon does. The OF website for creating leaderboadrs and achievements is pretty bad too I think. There’s no way to delete anything once you’ve created it, and its pretty tricky to set up a testing specific environment.

I’ve only published a game with Agon so far, and after waiting to get my package emailed to me for the supoort team, submission went perfectly, and my game is currently in What’s Hot, so sales wise its doing well. I wish they had more branding material like OpenFeint does, with icons and badges to display on your site and app icon.

Right now I’m about to submit my next game, and I have two separate versions, one with Agon and the other with OF. Both are ready to go, but I’m unsure as to which network to run with. I’d like to stick to one if possible, having too many apps with different networks can confuse users. If you’d like, please post what experiences you’ve had. Thanks!

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Any chance of an example project? :lol:

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Once I’m all done with this title, I’d be happy too. I know Agon has a tutorial project, if you search their site.

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thank you for sharing.
I am aiming to implement Agon in my frist game, and your experience helps.

5

I have added OpenFeint to Deep (update still in review with apple), and another game which I recently submitted to apple. I’m now implementing it in a third game.

I think it’s fairly straightforward to implement. The first time I tried, I had some trouble getting it to work in xcode, but now that I know the procedure, it goes smoothly every time.

I also tried Scoreloop, which was pretty hard to implement in xcode too (at least, for someone who doesn’t understand xcode very well), but I got it to work in an accceptable amount of time, and I really like Scoreloop. The main reason why I decided to go with Openfeint instead, is that they seem to have a much larger userbase.

Can’t say much about Agon because I haven’t tried it.

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I implemented Agon and after the latest release it works great. It was easy to implement with the Unity specific libraries.

The documentation needs some work as it looks like it was generated from code comments (needs sample unity script code for example) but other than that worked just fine.

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I also used AGON in a recently submitted game (Chalk Fighter). The Unity Basic example made it very easy, and support through both email and their web site has been terrific.

The downside to AGON is that if you want to rely on it for your local high scores list, the user HAS to create an AGON profile before any scores are saved.

I would prefer to wait until the player has finished their first game before introducing them to online leaderboards and making them login to a 3rd party service. Other devs have suggested that AGON should create a default profile behind the scenes (“Player 1” or whatever), which would solve this issue.

As it is, my choices were to force them to create an account before playing, or create my own offline leaderboard (redundant) and then worry about syncing those scores to AGON if they decide they want to go online. I chose the first for simplicity, so we’ll see how users respond. (If AGON adopts the default profile method in the future I will have zero complaints).

Don’t have any experience with Open Feint.

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We are using Agon online (for Unity Basic) for Samurai and we will use it in future projects also…

Very fast and easy implementation and great support…

Sanjuro

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does anyone have experiences with openfeint or the other scoreboard things affecting sales ? if so, is it significant ?

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It definitely depends on the game.
If you have something where players can actively challenge each other through the high score, the impact on replay value can be significant if you take the opportunity to use it (tower madness with their weekend competitions as a master example).

If you have a single player targeted game or don’t intend to invest in really benefiting from the system, then such score systems primarily give you local and online highscore lists, achievements and potentially some twitter / facebook exposure (discussable if that really happens and has an impact. I disable it by default on both as I don’t want iphone game spam there) for free with little effort and thus saves you time.

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I just released Zombie Pop! with AGON 1.3.1 As I wrote above, my biggest gripes with AGON were lack of branding materials and built in notification support. Well, since then they’ve released icon overlays, and have recently released a newer version of the plugin that supposedly makes it easier to use with iPhone Basic. (http://forum.unity3d.com//viewtopic.php?t=35662&highlight=agon) I managed to create a simple pop up system using the callback delegates, which works for the most part. (see screenshot). Sometimes, the pop up appears when nothings been unlocked, but I’ve only seen it on my test device.

AGON also releases new versions faster then OF, but they also change the API with every release, making it difficult to upgrade an existing game with the newer version quickly. There’s also a pretty long wait time in which you have to wait while the AGON team moves your game data to their production servers. (With Zombie Pop, it took about 2 hours to receive the confirmation email.) Waiting on a simple email just to be able to submit your game is kind of annoying.

OF just released a newer version that has better documentation for Unity, but I’m not sure if they’ve made any improvements as far as the way it communicates with Xcode/iPhone Basic.

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Hi Guys,

Congrats on the release of your AGON enabled games Brandon!

Just wanted to provide a bit of input to this topic. I am one of the developers of AGON Online, so be aware that everything I say is biased :wink:

Firstly thanks for the kind words on the AGON Games site. This is something that we will do a lot of work on in the future and it will be re-branded to AGON Community when the next update is launched with the ability for players to login.

Regarding the comments on the iPhone client interface, then we still feel that the more game focussed approach of AGON works better than that of our competitors. We are aware that there are a couple of features that would be very nice to add - clicking on user profiles and app discovery being some of them.

For our next update we will add a very improved friends discovery functionality; this should make it a lot easier for people to find any friends they have that are already using AGON and also allows them to easily recommend to their friends to play the current game. The recommendation system will allow the users to recommend the game to users that are not already using AGON, by sending either an email, Facebook notifications or a tweet.

We will also add a big improvement to our sign up flow. Firstly we have decided that we will no longer require users to register up front - this, we must admit, was a design flaw. Instead users will be taken directly into AGON without any need to sign up beforehand. They are given an offline profile with a default username. Once inside AGON, the users will be able to explore what it is all about and they can push a button when viewing anything that requires an online profile, at which point they will then be taken through the current sign up flow. We hope this will actually be more enticing for users, since this will allow them to get a glimpse at what it is all about, before deciding to create an online profile.

With regards to the many API changes that have been made to the Unity plugin, then this was primarily because we needed a couple of iterations on the plugin before we have ended up with something we feel is very good and very easy to use. The current 2.0.0 AGON Unity plugin is a complete mirror of the Objective C API and provides exactly the same functionality for both Unity Basic and Advanced users as we provide to Objective C programmers.

Finally I just wanted to provide a direct link to the AGON Unity sample project: http://developer.agon-online.com/downloads/db_downloads/libagon1.3.5-0-gdeff9c4d-UnityJavaScriptExample-2.0.0.zip - It contains a single script (GameLogic.js) on the main camera which controls all of the game logic and takes care of all AGON API calls.

Sorry for the long post - I hope you will find it informative…

Best regards,
Morten
AGON Online Developer
http://developer.agon-online.com