Kongregate Opens It’s Portal To Silverlight, Unity, and Others.
Wednesday, December 16, 2009 at 3:46PM (UPDATE: Kongregate has temporarily stopped excepting Silverlight and Unity games. They are working through some user experience issues with offering these type of games.)
Quick, name an online games portal. Now tell me what platforms they support.
I'm guessing your answer to the second question was Flash. Flash is a behemoth in the online games ecosystem. Today it pretty much IS the online games ecosystem.
Thing is, while Flash has been and still is a great platform for building online games, it's no longer the only show in town.
A number of developers, myself included, are writing our online games with Silverlight, Microsoft's Flash-like technology.
Diver 2: A Silverlight game I’m currently working on.
Others are using the a game technology called Unity that allows a developer to write full-blown, true-3D games that run in the browser.
Velociraptor Safari: A Unity Game by the guys from Blurst
Still other early adopters are beginning to toy with game development using the still-in-the-works HTML 5 spec.
It's been my contention for a while now that Flash-ONLY online game portals are the present, but not the future of online games.
The online game portals of the future, the next-gen game portals if you prefer, will open themselves up to these other ,non-Flash, platforms and their devoted legions of game developers.
To be clear, I'm not contending that Flash becomes any less relevant in this new open ecosystem, it's just getting some new friends to hang with.
On Dec 15th, Kongregate announced Konduit and became the first major portal to open itself to non-Flash games.
From the Konduit website:
Konduit is a new application platform that allows developers to integrate any browser-based game with Kongregate’s array of community features. Developers can now use JavaScript, ActionScript or REST APIs from their own back-end to tap into features such as achievements, leaderboards, virtual goods, profiles, and chat.
This means Unity games, Silverlight games, JavaFX games and actually any games that can be hosted on a website are supported by the Kongregate portal through their new IFrame hosting feature. Furthermore, since Konduit supports javascript and REST access to it’s api’s most of these technologies should be able to utilize the many game related services Kongregate offers. I applaud them for this move and for having the foresight to see a bigger picture.
Personally, I've been wanting to get my Silverlight games on Kongregate since the first day I found Kongregate on the web. The morning after I read the Konduit announcement I submitted my game, Tire Storm, to Kongregate using the new IFrame option offered by Kongregate. It took much less than an hour!
The game went into preview mode and went into a queue to be reviewed by Kongregate. A few hours later I received the following email from Jim Greer, CEO of Kongregate:
Hi Jeff -
I published this for you. Congrats, you're the first Silverlight game on Kongregate...
You can see and play Tire Storm on Kongregate here.
For those that don’t feel like jumping over there, here’s a screenshot.
Silverlight game on Kongregate
I look forward now to digging into the Konduit platform API and livening up my current and future games with the services the new system offers to us non-Flash game developers.
Finally, on behalf of all us non-Flash developers, A BIG, BIG THANK YOU to the Kong!
-Jeff Weber
Wait, wait, wait… how do you submit a non-Flash game to Kongregate, you ask?
- Get your game onto the web in a blank html page. (Nothing but your game in the top left corner of the screen)
- Get a Kongregate account here
- Go to the Konduit page here
- Near the bottom of the page you will see a section title “Non-Flash Games” Click the “Click here” link and fill out the forms and follow the instructions. (Here is the direct link to the IFrame upload page. Notice the “iframe=true” at the end of the url: http://www.kongregate.com/games/new?iframe=true)
- Be sure to have a friendly fall-back message for those that do not have the plug-in required to play your game. Here is mine.. could be better but hey.
Ok, that’s all… have fun.
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Reader Comments (10)
Nice one! I'll be sure to check it out!
silverlight for president :D
btw i dont know if you mentioned this before but which .net programming do you use? c# is my favorit :)
O.o the possibilities!
Thanks for letting us know!
What about games using Java Web Start?
@babel, I use c# most the time. vb.net sometimes at work.
@julien, pretty much anything that can run on the web will work. Just put it on a page by itself and Kong can put it in an iframe.
Cool Jeff! Just added my game "Balloon Mayhem" too, let's hope they approve it.
Kongregate is not accepting Silverlight or Unity games at the moment:
"Thanks for your submission. At this time, we're holding off on
approving any Unity or Silverlight games. We had some confusion
amongst our users due to the new plugins required, leading to games
getting harsher responses and lower scores than they deserved. In
light of this, we're investigating options to improve the user
experience and offer better developer support for Unity and
Silverlight games.
We'll be investigating our options further in the coming weeks, and
hope to have more information about a solution in early 2010. If we
get a working solution we will of course make an announcement inviting
developers to upload their games to Kongregate. Until then though,
I'm afraid we've decided to not approve any iframe games using either
of those technologies.
Thanks again, and hopefully we'll be able to see your game on
Kongregate early next year."
Congatulations, good job and go on !
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