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Clay.io

Developing games is hard. It’s even more difficult if you have to take care of all the tedious features like payment processing, achievements, leaderboards, social integration, etc. That’s why Clay.io takes care of all that for you with an easy-to-use JavaScript API. We asked Clay.io Co-founder Austin Hallock, to give us the inside scoop on the platform.


At Clay.io, we think HTML5 is a fantastic environment for developing games – we are betting on it 100%. Our goal is to help with the tedious aspects of game development: distribution and high-level features, so you can focus on developing the game itself. This post highlights how the tools we’ve created can help you conquer the world with your game development.

Gamification

It’s a bit humorous that I talk about “Gamification” for games…because, well, they’re already games. The reason I use that word is today gamification is associated with features like achievements, high scores, posting scores to Facebook and Twitter, leveling up, etc… Each of these features is often looked over by developers, but they are pivotal for retaining players.

We’ve developed an HTML5 Game API with a primary goal of making these features as simple as possible to implement. For example, to post a high score, then show the leaderboard, the code with Clay.io is:

var leaderboard = new Clay.Leaderboard( { id: 'leaderboard-id' } );
leaderboard.post( function() {
// post callback, show the leaderboard leaderboard.show();
});

The above code brings up the leaderboard:

HTML5 Game Analytics

The features we currently offer are:

  • User Accounts
  • In-game payments
  • Persistent Data Storage
  • Leaderboards
  • Achievements
  • Analytics
  • Social Integration
  • Screenshots
  • Multiplayer Rooms
  • Cross-Promotion

We wanted to make it as easy as possible to integrate these features, but we also wanted them to be extremely customizable with clear documentation on how to do so.

Of course, there’s always the option of doing this in-house. For some, that makes sense and is a valid approach, but the task is trickier and more time consuming than it may seem. Various odds and ends exist for each platform: the Chrome Web Store, mobile, Windows App Store, etc… and that work can add up to be quite a bit (trust us, we know that very well) – fortunately with a single service taking care of these issues, you don’t have to, and can focus on the game itself.

Distribution

There are two approaches you can take for revenue when developing a game: 1) Developing a game to be sponsored, whether it’s exclusive, or licensed out, and 2) Developing a game to generate income itself through advertising and in-game payments. The two can overlap some, but if you’re planning on going with the second option, distribution will be a big deal for you. You make more money as your game is played by more people.

HTML5 is great because there are so many marketplaces you can get your game in: The Chrome Web Store, Windows App Store, Facebook, Mozilla Marketplace, the list goes on. Each of these marketplaces however, has their own quirky needs. For example, Facebook requires your game to be hosted over SSL, the Windows App Store requires your files to be UTF-8 with BOM, many of them require their own version of a manifest file, whether it be in JSON or XML. Clay.io takes care of all these oddities for you with our HTML5 Game Distribution exporter.

Tracking Distribution

It’s not only important to spread the seed for your game, it’s also important to see which marketplaces are most effective – it’s good to know where to focus your effort moving forward.

HTML5 Game Analytics

Clay.io automatically tracks this information if you are using are the API – you can normalize it by other metrics, meaning you can view the time spent per view on each site, or number of views per purchase, etc..

Our Own Marketplace

In addition to the tools we provide for distributing your games to these other marketplaces, we’ve also developed a marketplace exclusively for HTML5 Games. Each of the other marketplaces are great, but the main thing they lack is the ability to play games on any platform/device. The Chrome Web Store limits you to Chrome on Desktop, as do the Mozilla Marketplace and Windows App Store.

Our main goal is to help HTML5 game developers as much as possible, which means we really care what you have to say on how we can improve our products and service. With that said, please reach out to us with your comments and suggestions at contact@clay.io.

Share List

You might also find this interesting:


  1. AT&T HTML5 Mobile App Store The HTML5 Bandwagon got kicked into the next gear with the announcement at CES 2012 that AT&T is developing an HTML5 App store for devices on it’s mobile network for...

  2. Building HTML5 Metro Games For Windows 8 With windows 8 bringing HTML5 to the forefront via the Metro interface, it will be possible to build HTML5 Games as “native apps” that have access to native features of...

  3. 4-Part Creating a Simple Windows 8 Game with JavaScript Tutorial Chris Bowen has written a 4-part series on SitePoint on creating a game for Windows 8 using JavaScript. The tutorial series walks you through the steps of building Catapult Wars,...

  4. Twinkle Pop: 5 platforms, 1 code base Twinkle Pop is a casual game of the bubble-popping variety developed by Bluega. It’s developed on their proprietary BXG engine for which they’ve developed packaging tools that package the game...

  5. HTML5 Game Starter Kit for Windows 8 The blog digitalerr0r has an excellent 3-part series on creating a HTML5 Game in Windows 8 that shows you the pieces you need to build a game for Windows 8...

HTML5 Tools

License HTML5 Games

Are you a company looking to license HTML5 games? We recommend MarketJS.com, a B2B platform for licensing games.

MarketJS has over 300 HTML5 games for licensing. They also provide additional services such as game reskin, custom development, and white label portals.

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