The IC GameKit is drop-in solution for adding achievements, game and user data saves. The GameKit consists of 2 main canisters, a back-end canister that persists all the data associated with the achievements, game saves etc and the front-end that is a react web app that can be used to manage this data. Additionally a demo game canister is included that shows how a typical game canister can make use of the GameKit. All data relevant data is held in stable memory and hence will persist across upgrades.

Multiple games can be created inside a single GameKit back-end canister hence it is envisaged that a game studio may only need one canister deployed to cater for all their games. Additionally, multiple admins can be added to the GameKit canister to enable easy management across a team. Each game that wants to utilise the GameKit should have its own canister and that canister should be added as an admin too.

The front-end react web app enables you to:

• Add / remove admins
• Create a new game
• Specify achievements associated with that game

And soon will allow:

• Save game data viewing
• User data viewing

Data can be stored against each game set up in the IC GameKit. For instance you may want to have a list of pets that can be randomly earned in the game and that you can add to easily without redeploying your game. You can set up multiple key/value pairs, both are held as strings so you can store your list of pets in json format and retrieve them in-game as needed. This would look like:

# Pets
Key       Value
rewards  { "pets" :
[
  { "name": "Mouse", "url" : "https://roguefoxguild.mypinata.cloud/ipfs/QmXXba3DLd8y6DyM7rri1aQap5p8LTtcTaz7TLN4wS846B" },
  { "name": "Cat", "url" : "https://roguefoxguild.mypinata.cloud/ipfs/QmNPhRKoQPppkQ6GxbiUniyyUkjY9Tht7Vyn1pvQ1DDEiY" },
  { "name": "Dog", "url" : "https://roguefoxguild.mypinata.cloud/ipfs/QmecJRNGz44hvvMQLayQH6tDM2BQgYP7dDLGprMbd4o6Kt" }
]
          }

This is where you can store data about a player that is consistent across all your games. This will most likely be profile data like social links, display name etc.

Specific to a player within a game, game saves can be used to store the progress that a player has made in a particular game.

Only Admins can create games and add achievements. You can add a wallet prinicipal as an admin with:

# Adds a new Admin
dfx canister call ic-gamekit-backend addAdmin '(principal "ns7tc-nfpjp-wggqg-o5bag-feolr-dlb5q-3zcdz-vcavb-hyw2u-ypiwj-7ae")'

The deploying identity automatically becomes an Admin.

Install dfx by following these instructions.

# Install mops (npm i -g ic-mops) , the motoko package manager and install dependencies with
mops install
# Install all other dependencies with
npm install

If you want to test your project locally, you can use the following commands:

# Starts the replica, running in the background
dfx start --background

# Deploys your canisters to the replica and generates your candid interface
dfx deploy

Once the job completes, your application will be available at http://localhost:4943?canisterId={asset_canister_id}.

If you have made changes to your backend canister, you can generate a new candid interface with

npm run generate

at any time. This is recommended before starting the frontend development server, and will be run automatically any time you run dfx deploy.

If you are making frontend changes, you can start a development server with

npm start

Which will start a server at http://localhost:8080, proxying API requests to the replica at port 4943.

You will need to run the following command to add the test Admin user before running the tests.

# Adds a test Admin
dfx canister call ic-gamekit-backend addAdmin '(principal "rwbxt-jvr66-qvpbz-2kbh3-u226q-w6djk-b45cp-66ewo-tpvng-thbkh-wae")'

Then run the tests with:

# Runs test
npm run test

If you are hosting frontend code somewhere without using DFX, you may need to make one of the following adjustments to ensure your project does not fetch the root key in production:

• setDFX_NETWORK to ic if you are using Webpack
• use your own preferred method to replace process.env.DFX_NETWORK in the autogenerated declarations
  • Setting canisters -> {asset_canister_id} -> declarations -> env_override to a string in dfx.json will replace process.env.DFX_NETWORK with the string in the autogenerated declarations
• Write your own createActor constructor