We've had a lot of good progress on our space tower defense game recently: lots of good coding, art, and music. But in a departure from our regularly scheduled program, we're doing a special feature: one developer (that'd be me) making a Facebook game from scratch to release in just one business week. Five days to do everything. And I'm going to be blogging about it the whole time.

Today is the first day of that endeavor. I'll be doing daily summaries at the end of each day. For now, there are a few assumptions I've already made about where I'm at with starting this thing:

• I've already decided on a programming language, framework, and hosting service: Python, with Google App Engine.
• Based on that, I already know the Facebook SDK I'll be using: my fork of the official Python SDK. (I used a fork of the third-party PyFacebook in the past, so this will be new to me.)
• Facebook Credits are still in beta, so I'll have to use a third-party to monetize virtual goods. I've used TrialPay in the past, and I loathe their interface, so I'll be trying something new this time around. Social Gold appears to be the most promising.
• I already have the Facebook account I'll be using setup (the Zen Otter one), but not the application itself.

Finally, the concept of the game is already fleshed out most of the way: it's working title is tentatively "Friend Fight." The idea is that you challenge friends to fights where your health and stats are based on your profile stats - number of friends, pictures, etc. There will be some basic attacks and spells you can cast to begin with, but to do more damage you'll have to buy the more advanced versions. Leaderboards will be a pivotal component. That's pretty much the entire game. Simple, but easily extensible: I can always add more and more powerful (and expensive) moves to the game.

Now I'm off to get this thing started. Full speed ahead!

UPDATE

Here is the entire complete series:

• Day 1: Setup and Scaffolding
• Day 2: Web App Work
• Day 3: Monetization with Social Gold
• Day 4: Integration with Facebook
• Day 5: Troubleshooting Facebook
• Day 6: Getting Playable
• Day 7: Copy and Styling

There's also the conclusion post and the live game, which you can play right now.