Customizing the theme

Happy Halloween from Hyzonia!

As a Game Publisher you always want to have something new to show to your visitors. Having a game in for the season promotes better “playability.” This Halloween is a good opportunity to seize it. Customizability is a  big feature of Hyzonia games. Depending on the type of the game a publisher is able to customize the look and feel, language and locale, and even the game dynamics. One of the simplest kinds of customization is changing the theme.  In this post, I will guide you through the easiest way to change backgrounds for your advergame.

Let’s take Hidden Objects game type as an example. Its default background is underwater, and we want to change it to halloween.

NOTE: Before doing the customization, you need to check the Game Customization Guide that can be found at http://docs.hyzonia.com. To get through in this example, select Hidden Objects. You will see the 3 categories to customize the game – Theme, Basic and Advanced Configurations.

REMEMBER: On this game, background in defined as “LAYERS.” You will find the LAYERS definition under Advanced Configuration. The documentation describes how that object is used, what kind of file type works best. It shows the code you need to edit; and it also shows you Related Graphic Elements you could use to replace the layers. Although, you are always free to use your own images, provided you upload it somewhere. I assume that you will go through it yourself as it is not really the subject of this blog, well, not for now.

Going back to customizing, here are 5 simple steps to change your game’s LAYERS / background images (Click screen shot images for larger view):

1. Access your Control Panel at http://www.hyzonia.com/UI/IslandMaster/IMProfile.aspx. Click on  "Customize your adver-game link" (or directly go to this address http://YOUR_SUBDOMAIN_NAME.hyzonia.com/im/).
   
   
   
   
   
2. In reference to the Game Docs, we knew that LAYERS can be changed under Advanced Configurations, so click on it on the right menu panel.
   
   
   
   
3. Advanced Configurations is in JSON format. You must find the code defined in the Game Docs easily. Here is what we need to look for in this example:
   
   

   LAYERS: [{
           url: "http://fs.hyzonia.com/hyz.islands/hiddenobjects/themes/halloween/pbg/bg-4.jpg"
       },
       {
           url: "http://fs.hyzonia.com/hyz.islands/hiddenobjects/themes/halloween/pbg/bg-3.png"
       },
       {
           url: "http://fs.hyzonia.com/hyz.islands/hiddenobjects/themes/halloween/pbg/bg-2.png"
       },
       {
           url: "http://fs.hyzonia.com/hyz.islands/hiddenobjects/themes/halloween/pbg/bg-1.png"
       }],
   

   
   
   
4. All you have to do is replace the URLs with the new URL of your new Halloween LAYER images. And click Save.
   
   
   
   

Congrats! Refresh your advergame URL to see the changes. Easy isn’t it? You can always revert back to the default theme by clicking the restore default button. That’s it! Again, you could save time and understand the graphics specs and have a better procedure by always referring to the Game Customization Guide first. Happy Customizing!

Read more...

Widgets Watch: Add Star Ratings to your Game

Let your visitors tell you how they like the games on your portal. Players can easily rate your page by only selecting from stars 1 - 5. This will also encourage new visitors to try out the games by the ratings it has.

AddRating.com enables you to use a simple, clean and efficient stars rating widget built with Javascript. So clean it has no other unnecessary texts or graphics but the stars and the average rating against the total number of votes. Unlike other widgets, you don't need to sign-up to their website to use the widget for the Hyzobox. You can customize its colors too. Simply copy the script and paste it to where you would want it to appear on your game page.  Click here to see how we used it on our games.

Your may also want to try some similar widgets:

• StarWidget 
• WidgetBox 
• Widgets-Gadgets
  

Read more...

Hyzonia is a network of web services

We like our new web server. It’s now being used for hosting Hyzonia.com main website and the Core. The migration of files, websites and settings from the old server to this new one was very smooth, honestly I was expecting us to have a big headache in moving a complex web app like Hyzonia, but so far it’s working flawlessly.

The features that we have developed to make Hyzonia network more scalable played a big role in making this transition easy and smooth. The nodes, parts and modules of the application use web services to communicate with each other and clearly when we have web services it really doesn’t matter where those parts reside in; during this migration we were able to move modules individually. On the other hand we’ve used provider pattern aggressively in the codes, hence features can have multiple implementations and switching among these different implementations is very easy and immediate. Using all these things, if a module goes down because of the new environment, somebody can connect the app to the old module (a web service feature) or configure the app to use another, more stable implementation of the module.

Similarly a third party developer who wants to develop a new game for Hyzonia has two options:

1. Consume web services
2. Create new implementations for some abstract functionalities

(Actually there’s a third way, somebody can customize an existing game, it’s cool and exciting but I’m not counting it as a new type of game)

In this blog we will focus first on the easier option that is using web services. All the functionalities that Hyzonia provides for games are available as part of web services, and here we will gradually talk about them.

Right now we are working with a small community of developers to fine tune the APIs, drop us a message if you are interested too.

Read more...

Hyzobox works with Wordpress widgets

The idea of Hyzobox allows you to create your own game portal. You can embed any of our advergames into your website or blog and customize the look and feel to blend well with your design. Our well-defined Customization Docs offer you wide range of options to modify the theme and/or behavior of the game. Aside from that, you are free to further style your game portal or the game page itself by utilizing any available apps or widgets online.

To begin with, let’s look at 2 of the many Wordpress widgets that promotes better interaction: Intense Debate and Poll Daddy.

Intense Debate is a Comment Form widget that encourages every visitor to respond to whatever in the thread because of its usability, and its 'Social Commenting' feature. It has customizable CSS and docs as well to guide you to create your own styles and match with your game or game portal.


Poll Daddy is one of the most genius poll widgets available today. You can customize or create your own CSS, insert HTML, define the data you want to collect, and a lot more cool features. Having a poll in your game portal helps you determine which games are hit to your audience and what kind of audience you have.

To use them, just sign-up at these websites, register your blog or website, and copy and paste the scripts to where you want the widget to display.  See how we used Intense Debate.

Read more...