Saving Data to GameBus

How can I save SugarVita data in GameBus so people can see when they played SugarVita?

In the entry, GameBus & SugarVita (Concepting), I talked about what I need in order to successfully implement a connection between SugarVita and GameBus. This is the first part from the implementation, saving data to GameBus.

Research Methods

Library

• Product analysis

GameBus already has quite a lot of endpoints and other features which could help me. First I needed to follow some steps in order to make SugarVita available as a data provider in GameBus. To do this I got dev permissions in GameBus and added SugarVita as seen below.

I also had to fill in a form which included the data which would be send from SugarVita. Pieter van Gorp later added this to GameBus in the form of a so called Game Descriptor which is basically an activity.

Workshop

• Prototyping

After successfully testing this method in in Postman, I went back to SugarVita. I created a panel which shows at the end of the game (don't mind the ugly UI). This panel asks for which player data to save to GameBus and after that if the player would like to share their playthrough with GameBus.

After choosing yes or no the following method is called.

The boolean in the CreateActivity() method determines whether or not the playthrough data gets saved. The data gets incorporated and send to a NetworkManager which sends the data to the backend endpoint.

Results & Validation

The result is that a SugarVita player is able to save their playthrough on the GameBus servers. This allows the player to have insights in when they played SugarVita, but more importantly, gives other players the opportunity to play against you and vice versa. 

*These screenshots were taken after the features in the devlog entry: Fetching Data from GameBus were completed

Usage

This is the first step towards attaining the goal of giving people the opportunity to play against each other. It also gets used for people to be able to see when they played SugarVita.

Sources 

• GameBus App. (n.d.). GameBus. Retrieved March 21, 2022, from https://app.gamebus.eu/