Hey Devs,
We've been rolling with Game API v1 for a while now. If you're not familiar with it, check it out here: http://gamejolt.com/developers/achievements-new/
Let's start thinking about Game API v2!
What do you want in an API that v1 currently isn't doing yet? How can we build on top of the v1 platform, making things better, cleaning things up, and implementing new features?
Note that the Achievements API will change to become the Game API. No longer will it be mainly about trophies and scores. It'll be about giving developers a great and stable platform to build out their future games on without worrying about the scalability of going from hundreds of players to hundreds of thousands.
What are your wants? What does your heart desire? How do I make you happy!?
Go!
## Current Ideas ##
Global Changes
Compressed data exchanges. For example, transferring a 16MB data storage item would take a while on slow connections.
Pagination between result sets with offsets and limits. (example: going through all the scores for a game)
Multiple commands in one call. Basically a /multi endpoint. Reduce network latency. Usefull when updating tons of data storage keys at time. Could be transactional.
Server Time
There needs to be a way to get the current server time.
http://gamejolt.com/community/forums/topics/date-and-time/1258/
Event Tracking
Allows you to gather stats and information on how people are using your games. Could be used to split test certain things in your game in real time, or allow you to push future updates to the game based on actual data of how your game is being used. Can also help weed out cheaters, I'd imagine.
Guest Accounts
This would allow any game to create a guest account to store stuff like trophies and scores. They would then at any point be able to sign up and claim these gained achievements for this new account on Game Jolt.
User Friendships
Allow devs to query users by friendships. Possibly allow users to make friends directly in games. There are a lot of possibilities with this one.
Scores
We currently don't allow them to see what rank they are in the leaderboard. Should maybe allow you to query any user to see their best score and what rank it is. That way it can tie in with friendships above.
Game Based Chat
Use the current GJ chat infrastructure to allow games to hook in and offer a public chat in their game. Could also allow multiple rooms for each game. Or direct messaging between players.
Geolocation
Offer a way to give location information for gamers. Should work on as many devices as possible. This should support trying to find other people close by to perhaps game with, etc. There would need to be permissions around this. User would have to explicitly allow a game to retrieve this info. Probably more useful for mobile games.
Social Integration
Allow devs to post on user's FB walls and twitter feeds. Should hook into the fact that we have their twitter and facebook accounts already. Permissions, permissions, of course!
Pub/sub
Allows real-time publishing of messages across channels between subscribers. This is being built out already, but sort of secret at the moment. Opens up the door to lots of things.
Registration
Users need to be able to sign up for Game Jolt through games. This is hard and needs to be thought out in depth. Should work with game libraries, by automatically attaching the game they signed up through to their Game Jolt account and allowing them to get notifications on new development and stuff through game news.
Matchmaking
Based on previous match scores, team up people that are similar in skill level.
Game Jolt Cloud
Data storage is great, but could be improved on. Stuff to think about: transactions, better querying support, better ways to update, maybe JSON objects rather than simple key/value.
Game Jolt Cloud Security
For global game storage security is an issue. Maybe we can allow certain rules on certain keys. So, you may have a "total_kills" value, and you can set rules such as, "Integer, never decrement, max increment at any time (10), call throttling by user (1/30 seconds) etc..."
Central Server
The whole idea of a Game API is to allow developers to not have to build out this infrastructure themselves, as it can be costly, hard to scale, hard to maintain, etc. However, for the games that require extra security, or perhaps for MMO type games that would need to have control of the game world, allow them to make a central server that all the clients talk to, which would then be funneled to Game Jolt. Also allows another layer of security. This would be for advanced users. Maybe we would only allow some people to do this? Don't want games to stop working in the future just because they couldn't keep their servers up.
## Suggested ##
Offsite ad-sharing **(from newt)
Microtransactions**(from new)
