Have been tinkering with the Facebook Developer API for over two days to manage to include the Crossword Fun game to their Application Directory. Then, it was necessary to wait for another two days for their system to be updated. I mean, that a simple cron job that should run once a day, needs a whole lot more. Four days in total… Now, that is a lot of wasted time for such a simple task!

I must say that Facebook developers’ experience with the API is as frustrating as Facebook end-users’ experience is (I never liked Facebook as a user, I find it unfriendly to say the least). But even as a developer who wishes to roll out an application to Facebook, you get more of the same sh*t; there is a complete lack of any formal documentation and hardly any testing to the new features that come out. Developers are easily lost and, what should be an easy task, becomes a daunting task! Many things seem to be broken since deployment.

Anyway, after a lot of effort I managed to port the Flash application to Facebook (just a Facebook iframe which hosts the Crossword SWF file) but it still requires some more visitors before being accepted. So, I’d appreciate your click on my link (requires login in to your Facebook account) over here:

http://apps.facebook.com/crossword-fun/

All participations are highly appreciated. Cheers.

We have been busy. We are taking a brake from 3D game development and have been working on a crossword generator project (made in flash & actionscript) that will generate a new Crossword puzzle with every refresh of the page. We have named this new game “Crossword-Fun” and it is still in early beta.

We kindly invite you to test the application and report bugs or just let us know what you think. The application can be found at the following link:

http://www.immersionfx.com/crossword-fun/crossword.html

The idea is of “Crossword-Fun” is simple: based on online Clue Databases (like dictionary.com) an algorithm selects a random set of words and their corresponding definitions and creates a new crossword on the fly. The user that attempts to solve the crossword will use an intuitive way to match words to the given definitions. Upon successful completion of the crossword, the user’s time will be recorded to the Hall of Fame.