If you've ever played Pokemon GO there's an option to sign up/in with your google account. I Don't believe this uses GPGS so I was wondering how I would go about that using PlayFab + Unity? I'm asking for a solution without Google Play Games Services because I have issues building to IOS when using their UNITY3D SDK
It's important to understand two things:
First, Pokemon Go was developed from what was originally an internal project at Google (which is where we also got its predecessor Ingress). As such, it's entirely possible they were using one or more API endpoints that aren't generally available.
Second though, you should note that many players expressed concern when they later logged into their Google accounts and saw that the title had been granted "full access to your Google account". It's hard to imagine a title that doesn't have a major IP behind it, like Pokemon, being able to survive the mistrust that would generate. Now, Niantic and Google worked together to retroactively re-spec the tokens that had been granted and resolve this issue, but it's highly unlikely that's work they'll be willing to take on for a new title.
We do have a deprecated AccessToken parameter in the Google login API call, which could be used in a similar way. However, we would highly recommend not considering this option, as it is no longer a supported path.
I had considered it as a login option for my game due to it being an easy and familiar way for potential players to login, but after reading your much needed and appreciated reply I'd like to ask if you think it would be a much better option to just create my own Login/Sign up solution integrated with PlayFab? I've been debating, and looking into this for a long time and just looking for a solid answer and way to go about the Sign up/login (preferably cross-platform) process on both IOS and Android at this point because it's taking up valuable time i could spend actually developing. Any help is appreciated
Generally speaking, my preference is to give the player a zero-friction sign-in to start, like a Device ID login, and then incentivize the player to add something else, like Facebook, Twitch, etc. later, after they've had the chance to play the game for a bit. Google is a good option, but if GPGS is causing you build problems and the GPG team isn't being responsive, I'd go with one of the others. The last resort - and usually only for PC games - is username/password or email/password. Definitely portable, but it's pretty high-friction, given all the typing required.
Could you expand on what you mean by zero friction sign in and DeviceID login Please. I just want to make sure I interpreted your response correctly. The game I am developing by the way, is a monster capture, battle, adventure kind of game and I want players to be able to have their save data accessible between both IOS and Android via login/sign up but also want to allow for offline play ONLY after the player has signed up just in case they do not have an internet connection and save data locally and just have it resync once a connection is established and upload the local save data to the server. I hope i'm making sense
Could you expand on what you mean by zero friction sign in and DeviceID login Please. I just want to make sure I interpreted your response correctly. The game I am developing by the way, is a monster capture, battle, adventure kind of game and I want players to be able to have their save data accessible between both IOS and Android via login/sign up but also want to allow for offline play ONLY after the player has signed up just in case they do not have an internet connection and save data locally and just have it resync once a connection is established and upload the local save data to the server. I hope i'm making sense
Sure, what I mean is that you want to get players into your actual gameplay with as little interaction ("friction") as possible - preferably zero. By using the device ID from the client device on iOS/Android, you can quickly create a user account in PlayFab that the player can use to get back to their online data. Here's a post where we talk about this in more detail: https://playfab.com/first-impressions-count-best-practices-friction-free-player-authentication/.
As to syncing offline data, the two things to bear in mind are:
1. Make sure to minimize the number of operations you need in order to sync up the data - preferably, just a save state that you can update in the player's data.
2. Don't forget that the player could be re-connecting with a device that was used to play offline, but for an account that they since played online on another device, so that game's state could be out-of-date. Check to see if their local data matches the online data and, if it doesn't, offer them the choice of which they'd like to keep.
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