It’s about to get a little bit easier to get games on Facebook if you are using the Cocos2d-X development tool.
Chukong Technologies, the company that owns and operates the Cocos2d-X game engine, revealed today that it is adding full integration with Facebook. This means that studios can quickly port their Cocos2d-X games to the social network and add features that take advantage of Facebook’s capabilities. Developers are now free to build a game for mobile that they can quickly publish to Facebook whenever they want.
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“Facebook is committed to supporting popular game engines that developers enjoy using,” Facebook engineering manager Bo Zhang said. “This new functionality for Cocos2d-x complements the SDKs that Facebook already provides for Unity and Parse, expanding cross-platform support for developers.”
Supporting cross-platform game engines is important for Facebook. In recent years, studios have turned away from producing games specifically for the service in favor of the more lucrative smartphones and tablets. But Facebook is still a potential revenue source, and developers have used Unity (and they can now use Cocos2d-X) to bring their games over to the social network after successful launches on iOS and Android.
A recent example is developer Glu Mobile’s Kim Kardashian: Hollywood. Glu debuted that game in the spring, but it didn’t get around to bringing it to Facebook until this month. Kim Kardashian is one of the highest-grossing games on mobile, but Glu knows it can also find an audience on the Web.
Social-game publisher Big Fish uses Cocos2d-JS, a Javascript variation of the tool, to make its games. The studio uses it for its biggest games, Fairway Solitaire and Big Fish Casino, and Big Fish plans to recommit to the Cocos now that it is easier to build a game once and launch it on iOS, Android, and Facebook.