Asmodee.net documentation » Guides

Technical and Features Requirements

To be compliant with Asmodee.net, apps need to support a number of features of the platform and also integrate several 3rd Party tools. This will help building your app ecosystem and give it the best chances to be a success, thanks to all the technical and marketing benefits that the platform will deliver.

Supporting the Asmodee.net Unified Accounts

This is by far the most important requirement. Your app should use Asmodee.net accounts to identify players in a unique manner. The API provides a linking mechanism in case you need to tie this account to your own database or to a 3rd Party database (like Steam, or PlayFab, etc.). The idea is to store all the player’s activity and information in a unique place, and provide her with a unified way to log in and access her profile, buddies, games history, etc. Think Battle.net as a comparison.

Apps that don’t support the unified accounts will be rejected.

Additional Requirements

  • Implementing a “More Games” screen for cross-promotion: being part of Asmodee.net means that your app will be showcased in other apps of the platform and benefit from our Marketing campaigns and content. In return, your app also needs to implement a screen that displays the other apps and products of the platform. Typically, your app calls the showcase end-point of the REST API to get the list of content to display. Unity developers can also use our SDK to do this without coding. See the Cross-Promotion guide for more information.
  • Displaying the Asmodee.net RSS feed in a “News” area: we found that pushing news directly inside apps about board games, the other apps, and of course announcements about your own app, is a powerful communication and marketing tool. People do read these news. It’s easy, so we ask you to do it.
  • Supporting the Amplitude solution for analytics: operating properly a game requires a powerful analytics engine nowadays, and Amplitude does exactly that. We will give you access to it under our account, so you can track your players behaviors and improve your game. It also helps us market your game.
  • Supporting the Helpshift solution for Technical Support: if Asmodee is in charge of doing the Technical Support to your players, then you are required to integrate Helpshift in your app. Helpshift is a great solution to implement a remotely-updated FAQ directly in your app, and allow your users to open tickets if the FAQ is not enough to help them. A powerful back-office is used to answer and close tickets. We will give you access to our Helpshift account for this.
  • International Support: your app must be UTF-8 compliant, and be available in English, French and German (we can help with localization). It must use a simple system to edit translated strings (like text files based on a widely adopted format like XML, YAML, CSV, etc.). If there are bitmaps with text in them, these bitmaps must exist as layered Photoshop files. You must avoid bad string practices such as code-based concatenation, single-byte string manipulations, etc. Make sure your UI elements have extra space to accommodate longer texts: French is 30% longer than English, German is 50% longer, and we won’t talk about Finnish…
  • Responsive User Interface: your app must be able to deal nicely with various screen sizes and ratios. Do not underestimate this, it’s a pain to do it properly especially with 2D elements. It must also support hdpi resolution (2x graphics). Be careful that a tablet-savvy user interface can be significantly different from a phone one: it’s not “just larger”. Worse, if you also support Desktop machines, be careful to adapt to Windows and MacOS special elements: scroll bars, hover “tips” balloons, etc. See the Best Practices guide for more details.
  • Cross-platform: your app must support at least iOS and Android. Desktop support under Steam is a great plus (Windows, and if possible, MacOS X). Players tend to use different devices and computers more and more and expect to find their game data seamlessly. So make sure you use the Asmodee.net services to synchronize the player’s preferences, Achievements, saved games, high scores, etc.