Bringing Angry Birds To Facebook
There’s no avoiding those Angry Birds. They are, quite literally, everywhere: toys, snacks, cartoons, plush toys and that wildly addictive game that seemingly everyone has downloaded at some point — 1 billion of us last year alone.
2012 was another landmark year at the Angry Birds aviary, otherwise known as Rovio. The Finnish-based developer not only released a slew of tie-ins — from Green Day to Star Wars — but also went social.
Not only did releasing Angry Birds on Facebook require the game’s engine to be rewritten in the all-new Flash 11, but the power of Facebook’s platform meant that the game’s mechanics could be tweaked further to take advantage of the social graph.
At the forefront of this project was Ville Koskela, a lead game programmer at Rovio. Ville has been a developer for his entire adult life, with a background in C++ and ActionScript. And when he’s not working on one of the biggest games in the world for the biggest social network in the world, he loves running in and around his home town of Espoo, Finland (he ran a 100-km race in under 12 hours).
0 comments: