Hello there Adventurers!
It’s finally the Summer here in the Northern Hemisphere and with that comes LOTS of sun! (Or at least a moderate amount of sun if you’re here in the UK…)
It’s a lovely time of year with longer days, bright colours and a freshness to the air. Lots to be grateful for!
The website has been going over a minor metamorphosis to make it a little more pretty, fit more within the “vibe” of AEGIS Game Studios, as well as make some backend changes to prepare for future plans. The latter namely being the testing of your game account for AEGIS Kingdoms.
What does that mean?
At present AEGIS Kingdoms uses Steam to handle it’s account validation which is lovely. It means technically I don’t have to worry about your game account, it’s all handled by a third party.
HOWEVER, the question was raised to me… “How are you going to handle monthly memberships?”, which in fairness to the person asking was a genuinely good question.
This has posed a bit of a unique problem and I’ll break it down for you like this:
USING STEAM:
- As long as you boot the game up through Steam, you’ll immediately log into your AEGIS Kingdoms account no problem. This is super great if you’re a player, you don’t even need to think about this process. Nice and easy.
- There is no need for a password reset feature because Steam handles your passwords. All your ‘account data’ is with Steam, so there’s no GDPR worries either. The only data collected is the literal stats of your character. I.e level, XYZ location, inventory, XP etc.
- All purchases must go through Steam.
This all sounds good which is why it was setup this way, HOWEVER (and this is the big doozy) what if I wanted to later release to Switch? or Mobile? or even Browser (WebGL)…
The problem suddenly is that because everything is tied to Steam, it’s closed within the Steam ecosystem – and of course Steam take 30% of each transaction for the privilege of using their services.
Now there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that, but when I build games it’s with the intention that it is accessible by most people who want to play the game. There are probably ways of getting it set up so that it works crossplatform with Steam integrated and profound mystical knowledge is used to achieve this, but unfortunately that’s outside of my skillset for the moment.
So it’s become apparent that needing a player account separated from Steam’s ecosystem might actually be necessary after all. Roll in the backend changes to the website..!
Currently there’s work being done on an ‘AEGIS Forums’, which is basically an amalgamation of account management (create account, validate email, reset password etc) as well as integration into the games systems.
It’s also a handy place for a game wiki, player guides, trading forum and bug reporting. So lots of good things there. Here’s a more complete list of things I’d like to use it for:
USING FORUMS:
- Account management – automated account recovery, email validation.
- Friendly community place to grow together with AEGIS Kingdoms.
- Single sign-on (login details) between forums & AEGIS Kingdoms.
- Integrated Stripe payments for single and recurring purchases.
- GDPR compliant for EU/UK.
- Organised feedback and discussions.
- Ability to use single sign-on crossplatform, so scope & considerations to release AEGIS Kingdoms to Switch, Mobile, Consoles.
- Player written guides to share with the community.
- Award dedicated members of the community with badges and special prizes outside of the limitations of Discord.
- Game statistics and information viewable. For example trade prices, online player count, world event announcements etc.
- Dedicated trading subforum.
- Detailed bug reporting.
- Create an account using OAuth (Discord, Steam etc)
- Connection with Discord to award / remove Discord roles based on forum activity, interaction and rewards.
- … and more!
So in terms of long term viability, it seems that having a managed account (aka “AEGIS Account”) is the way to go. I’m hopeful that this will be a positive, long term change but at the moment it’s still being developed.
It may simply be that if this doesn’t work, I’ll stay with Steam. Either way I’ll keep you posted!
So for all of you now going into Summer, remember to hydrate, enjoy the sun and I’ll see you in the next post!
– Five
