Creating a Virtual Good
Introduction
In the context of the GameSparks platform, a Virtual Good is any in-game asset that can be awarded, accumulated, or bought. This would cover XP points and in-game currencies as well as specific goods that deliver benefits in-game (such as convenience, customization, competitive advantage, and so on). These can be used and consumed cross-platform:
- You can set up Virtual Goods to be bought as In-App Purchases (IAPs). This is when you associate the Virtual Goods with the Product IDs of the corresponding items on the stores and when a good is purchased we can reconcile the store receipts with the items.
- You can define relationships between your Virtual Goods so they can be traded or converted.
There are many ways of awarding Virtual Goods. In this tutorial, we'll award the player with a Virtual Good by "purchasing" it. This is done via a BuyVirtualGoodsRequest.
FAQs? You can review Frequently Asked Questions about creating and managing your Virtual Goods.
Setting Up a Virtual Good
1. First, navigate to Configurator > Virtual Goods. The Virtual Goods page opens:
Any existing Virtual Goods are listed and you can edit or delete them.
2. Click Add. The Add Virtual Good page opens.
3. Next, enter the details of the new Virtual Good:
- Short Code - This mandatory field is the reference by which we'll award the Virtual Good. Short Codes are always unique.
- Name - This mandatory field is used when listing Virtual Goods in all of the returns.
- Description - This mandatory field is used to display what the Virtual Good is used for - use it for your own benefit to keep track of the Virtual Goods in a game.
- Currency Costs - This is the amount of any of the game currencies that is required to "purchase" the Virtual Good. In this example, a player will have to spend 1 of CURRENCY_1 to purchase the Virtual Good:
- You can create game currencies at Configurator>Currencies before you add currency costs to a Virtual Good. For details of how to do this, see the Currencies page. However, if you have enabled any of the default currencies for your game, you'll also be able to configure these currency costs for your Virtual Good - see Configuring Game Currencies on the Game Overview page.
You can leave the other configuration options as default.
Other Configuration Options? For more details on the configuration options for Virtual Goods, click here.
Purchasing the Virtual Good in the Test Harness
Now everything is set up, you'll need to navigate to the Test Harness and authenticate with one of the players you have registered previously. The previous tutorial showed you how to award your player with some currency via an Achievement. Now you are ready to purchase your first Virtual Good.
1. To start, and just to be sure, let's validate that the player has enough of CURRENCY_1 to purchase the Virtual Good using the AccountDetailsRequest:
- Note that the other currencies - currency1, currency2, and so on - that you'll see listed in the AccountDetailsResponse are default currencies.
2. To get the Virtual Good, under Requests click Store and select BuyVirtualGoodsRequest. To submit this request, you'll have to fill the following values in the JSON builder:
- currencyShortCode - This is the currency you're "paying" with. Here, it's CURRENCY_1.
- quantity - This is the quantity of the given Virtual Good that you wish to purchase. Here, it's 1.
- shortCode - The Short Code of your Virtual Good you'll be using in this request. Here, it's "GOLD_COIN".
3. Click Send Request.
Receiving a successful BuyVirtualGoodsResponse is a good indication everything has succeeded. However, you should still validate this by doing an AccountDetailsRequest. You should see that the Currency 1 has decreased by 1 and that you've been awarded with 1 Gold Coin.
