The Tropic Thunder Facebook Game was created to promote Ben Stiller’s Tropic Thunder movie for Paramount. The game allows users to play five levels of a top-down shooter, created specifically for Tropic Thunder, using various assets. Each level is unique in its own way, and each level contains its own “boss”. The aim of the game is to collect as many “Crying Monkey” awards as possible and racking up points.
If the user is still alive after completing the five levels, the game starts again, but the score continues. However, the game gets harder with each level. On completing the game, the player’s score is added to the Leaderboard and the user received a “Acting” rank and “Action” rank.
After the US launch of the movie, the application was updated and localized to four additional languages for the European launch. Towards the end of the campaign, the application had over 70,000 users.
The game itself was developed in Flash. The remainder of the application, flash integration and leaderboard components were build in PHP. There were some technical challenges in connecting PHP and Flash within Facebook, as there was no Facebook API available in Flash during the development phase.