Game Foundation Tutorials

Configure your game with parameters

Game data isn't just item properties, currencies or transactions. It is also a set of global configurations that may not concern the player inventory or wallet:

• for a given level:
  • the time you have to finish a level
  • its default difficulty
  • the minimum score you need to reach one, two, or three stars
  • the amount of soft currency you get when you finish it
• the default difficulty of the game
• a switch to display the starter pack or not for new players
• the default name of the main character
• ...

Those requirements are not related to anything Game Foundation manages at the moment, but yet, you still need to store those values somewhere.

The Game Parameter window

Game Paramter is very similar to other Game Foundation catalog item editors. As a Game Parameter is essentially another type of catalog item but at global level, the way you'll create a Game Parameter is similar to other item definitions we've shown you in the tutorials already.

Creating a Game Parameter

For this tutorial, we'll make something really simple. We'll get the Starter Pack example from above. We'll create a Game Parameter object to define two parameters:

• Do we want to see the Starter Pack flow or not
• In case we want to see it, which pack do we want to display

Click on the "+" button on the bottom left corner in order to create a new entry, and call it starter_pack, and click on the Create button add finish creating it.

Then we'll add two fields to define some paramters under this definition, under the Static Properties section:

(Note that currently that only static properties are available for Game Parameter definitions)

Let's create a boolean property called enabled. It will be used as a switch to enable/disable the starter pack feature. Set it to true.

Then create a string property called pack_key. We'll store the key field from the transaction definition to help us decide which one we'll use as the content for the starter pack.

Enter the key of an IAP transaction available in your catalog.

Getting the game parameter at runtime

Retrieving the game parameters is just like retrieving any catalog item. It all comes from GameFoundationSdk.catalog.

The snippet you'd use would look like the following:

// Gets the game parameter from its key
GameParameter starterPack = GameFoundationSdk.catalog.Find<GameParameter>("starter_pack");

bool enabled = starterPack["enabled"];
if (enabled)
{
    // Gets the pack from its key.
    string packKey = starterPack["pack_key"];
    BaseTransaction pack = GameFoundationSdk.catalog.Find<BaseTransaction>(packKey);

    // Here we'll put the code to display the pack and show
    // a button to sell it to the user.
}

Conclusion

Now that you've learned about expanding your game functionality with Game Parameters, the next section can help expand your game's retention by showing you how to use the Rewards system.

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