Yesterday Angry Birds landed on Google+, Google’s new social network and answer to Facebook. Angry Birds on Google+ is an HTML5 based version that in many ways is very similar to Angry Birds Chrome, with some notable exceptions that we’ll go into in a sec. The current version number is v1.0.2 and includes all three chapters of Poached Eggs, the Chrome Dimension episode (link to walkthroughs) and an exclusive episode called “Teamwork”. The latter may sound strange, but it’s actually pretty cool. This is one of the many areas where Angry Birds taps into the social aspect of Google+.
Updates:
Basically, the purpose of the Teamwork episode is to work together with your friends to unlock special levels. There are two groups of the levels in this episode:
If you’re stuck or just curious about the Teamwork levels check out the 3 star walkthrough videos!
As we mentioned above, the actual game play is very similar to Angry Birds Chrome, so we won’t go into that too much. That said, the window size is smaller on Google+ and there is no HD option. It plays fine for me, but your experience may vary based on your computer and browser.
Let’s move on to the social features. Beyond the Teamwork episode there are a few other social features available.
When you open up an actual level you notice right away in the top right hand corner that there two avatars and scores. This is your score and one of your friends, presumably the one with the highest score on that level. Having this right in the game play area allows you to compete against your friends and have a score to aim for.
Yet another social feature allows you to announce/post scores your scores to your stream by clicking the bullhorn icon. There are two ways to do this:
You can see the bullhorn icon in the screenshots under the “Leaderboards” section below.
Google+ is currently the only place outside of the iOS ecosystem that has fully-integrated leaderboards. We obviously have leaderboards here, but they are not fully-integrated (I wish!). So far as I can tell the leaderboard functionality is currently handled on a level-by-level basis. In other words, you will find a leaderboard for Poached Eggs Level 1-1, but you won’t find one for your total score across all levels. I’m sure that is something they’re working on though.
In order to play Angry Birds on Google+ you have to grant them permission to access certain information. Each game is a bit different. Angry Birds currently needs access to:
Currently, when you play Angry Birds Chrome your progress is stored in something called local storage. The issue here is that if you delete your browser cache it may delete your local storage cache as well (I say “may” because most browser have this as a separate option). When this happens your will lose all your progress in Angry Birds Chrome. Because it uses local storage it means that your progress is also only available in a single browser. Fortunately, this is NOTE THE CASE in Angry Birds on Google+. Your progress IS SAVED on the server in the cloud, which I have verified by deleting my local storage cache and logging in and playing from multiple browsers. So you can rest easy that your progress is stored safely on the cloud. Let’s just hope that cloud doesn’t get vaporized by a sunspot.
To get set up an running is pretty simple, but we’ll break down the steps just in case your not used to Google+’s interface yet.
We’ll be keeping this article up to date as we know more. If you have thoughts or questions please free free to leave a comment below. Thanks for reading.