The Life and Times of Capt'n Crumpet

Some of you may know that I’ve been developing a Facebook application over the last few weekends to practice my OOPHP/MySQL skills.

Well, I can safely say that it’s turning out to be a great success!

The application is caled City Folk Friends, and it’s to help people who play Animal Crossing: City Folk meet fellow players and swap friend codes so they can play online together.

It lets a player create a profile, where they enter their characters name, their town name, select all the different fruit they have growing in their town, and their friend code. The system automatically saves their country based on their Facebook profile, along with their unique Facebook ID.

The player then searches the database based on either fruit or country, or both, to return a random list of 15 players matching that criteria. They can view the restricted Facebook profile of each player, and see their player details, exlcuding the friend code.

Here, the player can add the person to their friends list within the application, and a request is sent over Facebook notifying the person of this. Once the other person adds the player to their list, they can then see each others friend code to enter in to their Wii.

Right now, in the first week it’s been public, there are 161 users and it’s growing steadily.

I’ve recently updated the application to run quicker and handle Facebook errors much more gracefully. I’m going to expand the application to City Folk: Wild World for the DS, as it uses very similar information, and include an online status for the search results.

So, that’s my weekend project! And I’m really chuffed people love to use it!