Hello everyone,
I have done a lot of searching on this subject and found parts of answers, but I’m not sure I’ve got everything I need.
Basically my question is this: What’s the best way to keep track of a player, or “user account”, that’s playing your game? For example, if my game is going to have a large database of questions, located on an external server, that players will answer, and I need to keep track of what players answered what questions, I would normally keep track of the user via a “user id” of some sort, or some key, that I could write back and forth to the database appropriately.
Are you allowed to ask a player to set up an account, after they purchase your iPhone game for example, so you have a distinct piece of information about them that you can store permanently, or will Apple disallow that? I wasn’t able to find that answer as of yet.
I’m not worried about the programming aspect of things, using the WWW class and all that, I’m just stuck on the theory behind how to keep track of each of the players. If a player answers some questions while on their iphone/itouch/ipad, then gets on their computer at home and logs in via the browser…well, I need to know who that player is for obvious reasons.
I’m just a bit fuzzy on how to do this with Unity, as I’m used to full fledged web application development.
Kind regards,
David
you would be allowed to ask them about it right
Wow, you’re fast Dreamora! 
So, it’s not a completely strange idea to force the player to fill out a form to create an account after they purchase the game? It’s the only plausible solution I could come up with, but I’ve never really seen that before with an iPhone game (yet).
Kind regards,
David
Its allowed by I would suggest also allowing some mode of play that doesn’t require this.
Personally if I’m prompted to create an account without the option to play without one, I remove the game.
If I can see value in creating account after playing or a bit, I’ll probably create an account.
You could always just automatically create an account based on a UUID and give them the option to attach a name/email/etc to that account later.
I agree with Jonny.
See if you can get in some kind of tutorial environment that works without it.
I know from other games that you can easily do it. Graal Online requires you to have an account for example as it is an MMO with no offline component.
But also the good old stuff like Aurora Feint relies upon having an account due to the heavy online binding and if you don’t have your data stored on the iphone, you will be asked to create an account
One thing I would recommend when you do something like this is that you offer a settings configuration module like other games / apps do where they can change the login credentials and alike outside your game
Very good ideas, and that makes good sense. After thinking about it for a bit I should be able to allow a user to play without creating an account, but then they’ll lose out on all of the features of playing it as a global game, as I’m planning.
It will be more work, of course, but it will be better for the player the way you two described.
Thanks very much for your feedback, both of you, it’s very much appreciated!
Kind regards,
David
I think a tutorial to give them an idea where its going should be fine.
Also thats often a good idea so they can train before going online instead of being ashamed and frustrated because all people that started earlier are worlds ahead or something.
but this naturally highly depends on the type of game