Thinking of this problem, we came with this clever idea to improve visibility of Indie Games using Facebook social network.

The concept behind IndieFb is very simple:

For each time that one of your game's players decide to publish their score to his Facebook Wall, potentially thounsand of people will be able to get your game's homepage.

Hopefully, this every once in a while will translate into more donwloads and consequently more sells of your games.

How does IndieFb works?

IndieFb-enabled games will offer an option somewhere in the game, that will show the player a alphanumeric code, which is encrypted against his gamertag.

This code can include his score for a certain stage or level of your game, and maybe a overall score too.

Then the player is sugested by the game to visit a facebook application url, in which he will find a form to enter the given code. Doing so, the player will be informed of the position he (or she) has ranked globally (compared to the rest of players that had done the same). At the same time, a post will be published to his (or her) Wall notifying his Facebook contacts about the fact.

That Wall post can include a link to your game's website (outside facebook) or your game's page within Facebook if you happen to have one. Any friend clicking in the player's Wall post, will be redirected to a page of your choice, where you can tell him about how cool your game is. You can even provide a link to take the visitor directly to your game's Marketplace within Xbox.com site, making it even easyier to download your game to his Xbox console.

Will be IndieFb useful for my game?

IndieFb is basically a global high-score table, so it must be helpful if your game progress can be expressed as a single or per stage "score" value.

If your game features a different nature of progress, that cannot be expressed a "score" value, we'll like to hear about it. Maybe we could find a creative way of Facebook-enable your game.

Availability

IndieFb is currently under development, although basic feature set is currently operative, we are looking into new ways to enhance player's and non-players experience withing facebook.

Release date is planned for this September.

We want to offer this feature in two flavours:

• Community Edition: This will feature ranking the player's score into a global high-score table, and publishing the results to his Wall. We want to offer this feature for free, full source code included, to anyone interested in improving his game's visibility.
• Pro Edition: Plus the community edition features, we will add custom navigation on the high-score tables, thumbnails of the stages, screenshots of your game, links to Marketplace, fully documented source code and CSS, customizing the application to your game's visual style, and much more. This edition will be charged and small amount of money, to be disclosed soon.

Wanna try it out?

"Rotor'scope - The secret of the endless energy" will be the first Indie Game to feature IndieFb. We are waiting the DreamBuildPlay results to disclose its launch date.

In the meanwhile, if your are willing to try out this feature for your game, we're offering an "early adopters program" for IndieFb. Please, feel free to contact us at: info(at)nivel21.net