Guidance on implementing game sharing

Hi all,


I'm looking for guidance on how to implement sharing of games. I have a little single-player game that I've developed, and I'd like to add the ability for someone to share their game with another person. The basic flow might be that a person plays a game and gets to a certain level in a certain amount of time, then shares the game with someone else, seeing if they can beat their time to get to that level. I can envision doing this in a couple different way but I'd love some guidance from the community on which way to go.


Option 1: Game Center. Seems like Game Center has APIs which would allow for this. Is Game Center still going strong? Being phased out in favor of Arcade? (Orthoganal to Arcade?). Are their any drawbacks to Game Center that folks run across? Do game developers find that their users resist/embrace using Game Center?


Option 2: Custom URL Schema: I can define the starting parameters to my game in a handful of settings, which could be expressed in URL parameters. I could imaging creating a custom URL scheme which would allow people to email/message a link to each other, and thus allow game sharing. Is that a decent way to go?


Option 3: Facebook or another service. This is all new to me, so I'm sure what's out there.


Anyway, I'd love some general guidance on what road to start down on.


Thanks!

Replies

Game Center comes with lots of functionality that you might want to consider. How to find another player, how to link to that player, real time matches, etc.. But if all you want to do is exchange the current state of a game between two users who know each other you could consider using CloudKit. Store the state in the public database under some identifier and just share the identifier. Quite easy.

Thanks! CloudKit wasn't on my radar for this. I'll check it out.