Thursday, December 13, 2012

Removing OpenFeint from Ninja Hamster Rescue

* This is a follow up to a post I previously made here about GREE shutting down the OpenFeint servers with about 1 month of lead time for developers to remove it from their games.

The last month has been incredibly hectic for me.  I've spent the large majority of my time working on a contract job, and the rest of my time spent getting Match and Flip ready for release on iOS before Christmas.  Luckily both of those jobs are winding down a bit, so I was finally able to turn my attention to Ninja Hamster Rescue and purging OpenFeint functionality from the Android and iPad version.  As a quick recap, OpenFeint is social system that provided some nice services like leaderboards and achievements, and was very easy to add to your game.

I'm a little upset about having to remove OpenFeint from NHR, one of the biggest reasons being I don't know of any alternative services offering achievement and leaderboard tracking for Android.  Unfortunately I don't have a choice though, especially since their servers are suppose to stop responding to requests sometime tomorrow (Dec 14, 2012), and I don't want the user experience to suffer from timed out web queries or what have you.  So what does that mean for people who played NHR?  For players using the iPad HD version not much will change, except OpenFeint will disappear and your achievements and leaderboards *should* continue to exist in GameCenter.  For Android players, the game itself will still perform exactly as it did before, the biggest changes being achievements won't unlock and you won't be able to compare your scores to other's on leaderboards.

Ninja Hamster Rescue on Google Play will be updated shortly, and even is getting a Holiday update to add a new level.

Ninja Hamster Rescue HD for iPad will probably take longer to update, as it will need to go through the App Store review process first.