Discord Integration

A topic by gamedevnet created Nov 19, 2016 Views: 4,358 Replies: 8

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Hello everyone!

TL;DR: I'd like to be able to get all of our players into a Discord server, any thoughts on how to best accomplish this?

I'm developing a networked multiplayer-only game, and would like to sell it as a First Access title while it's in development, much like Overland (Although our game will be F2P when it fully releases, and the early purchasers will be given extra perks at that time).

Being a multiplayer-only game, having a lot of active users is very important to keep the game alive; but being a first access game, we will only have a small group of early adopters. Therein lies the rub.

Our planned solution to this is to get all of our early adopters into a Discord server. In the discord server, they'll be able to say "queue up, I wanna play" and someone will indeed queue up, and they will indeed play. That's the idea anyway. A really neat part of this is that the developers will be in that Discord server as well, and we will be collecting a lot of feedback, issues, suggestions, etc. from our players, as well as just hanging out with them. :)

Ideally, the second someone buys our game, they'd automatically receive an e-mail with a 1-person invitation to our Discord server. Admittedly, I'm not quite sure how to put that together.

An alternative solution is that we can embed a non-expiring, unlimited link into the build, but that wouldn't be ideal as anyone could get into the discord, and we'd like to keep it to just the First Access purchasers.

Any and all thoughts, tips, comments, questions, and concerns would be much appreciated! :)
-Net

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Amos7 years ago(+2)

One thing that would allow it but that we don't support yet would be webhooks — when a purchase would get made, an HTTP POST request would be sent to a server of your choice with purchase info, letting you send the e-mail. We don't support that (yet).

A solution you can do right now is to encourage your users to play your game through the itch.io app, and use an app manifest to request an API token — sending this to your server will let you retrieve purchase information for the player, generate discord link for them and let them join the discord server from clicking a button in your game: a pretty low-friction approach if you ask me! (no need for them to open their e-mail at all).

Let me know if you have further thoughts — webhooks have been on my mind for a while but I can't guarantee an ETA for the feature, whereas manifests are working right now.

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gamedevnet7 years ago(+1)

Oh, actually Amos, you mention encouraging them to play through the itch app, is there a way to enforce the game only getting played through the app? I can enforce this from my end via the authentication, but it would be so much clearer for the players if there was an itch feature that just said "Only playable through itch client" and didn't allow them to download the build separately.

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Amos7 years ago(+1)

There's no way to do that yet, when we first released the app we promised that it wouldn't replace the website — basically, that the option to download from web would remain there. There's alternative ways to authenticate using the server-side API: https://itch.io/docs/api/serverside — you could ask folks for their e-mail, check that they've indeed purchased the game using that e-mail, and send them an e-mail with their Discord key!

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gamedevnet7 years ago

Thanks Amos, that sounds great! We want to have all of our players use the itch app because we need them to be on the same version as the server, so that's a friction cost we'd be paying regardless! Plus I'll probably always authenticate players and get added benefits like being able to use the players' usernames in-game.

I'll try and keep this thread updated with my adventures!

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2xmilk7 years ago

You get an email when a new purchase is made right? You could pipe that email into your server, parse it for the buyers email, and then send the Discord link. Discord has a solid API so it should be pretty straightforward to set that up.

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gamedevnet7 years ago

Oh, this also sounds like a nice way to set it up! I'll look into this as well! Hmm, not entirely sure how to pipe an email from Gmail to my server though.

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2xmilk7 years ago(+1)

Create a longform email address for the piping on your server, like sdlrgiuw4@yourdomain.com, and then in Gmail set up emails from itch.io to forward to that email.

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Harkonnan315 days ago

I'm not sure if this is the right place to ask this but I was wondering if there was any way to put my feed from itch.io into my discord as kind of a news bot?

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