14 DAY TRIAL // Facebook has announced a new partnership with the maker of the Unity game engine for better integration of Unity games into Facebook's Canvas app platform.
While it has always been possible for game developers to build a Unity game into the Facebook platform, the integration isn't seamless, to say the least.
"Today, at Unity's developer conference, Unite, in Vancouver, BC, we launched a new cross-platform SDK that makes it faster and easier to integrate your Unity game with Facebook," the social network announced.
"Whether you're building on iOS, Android, web, or all three, the SDK lets you continue to write in C# and provide social game experiences to all your players, regardless of the platform they play on," it added.
Thanks to the new Facebook SDK for Unity, games will work and feel better on the site. For example, notifications such as shares or requests are now displayed in the game rather than on top of it, so they won't pull you out of full screen and ruin the immersiveness.
Now, "porting" a game to the Facebook platform is as easy as filling out a few app details and providing a URL for the game data. What took a day's work before, hardly a long time, can now take a few minutes.
But the integration goes beyond the web. Unity games can now easily add Facebook features to their mobile ports as well, a crucial addition. The social network has been very interested in infiltrating itself into more and more mobile apps.
Facebook boasts that some 90 million of its users already have Unity installed, so the audience is there.
And, for those who don't have it installed, there's now a new streamlined install process so they can grab Unity from the Facebook page they're visiting and get to their game as fast as possible.