How to add Facebook Data Storage to Mobile Game?

Question

I was wondering how I would add the option for players to sign into their Facebook profiles on my mobile game and then have Facebook store their game save data, so they can recover it on any device when they sign into Facebook. Other Facebook features would include seeing their friends on the Facebook leaderboards, inviting their friends to the game and challenging their friends to beat their scores. I would hate for the Player's data to be lost, so the Facebook data save part is very important. A good reference to this feature is the Hungry Shark mobile game.

I wasn't sure how this works. My programming friend and I are creating the game together, but he doesn't know how to do this and I don't know how to program. Once I figure out exactly what has to be done, I would like to hire a programmer who knows how to add this feature.

Thank you!

Answer 1

Facebook does not provide storage for saved games. Facebook's OAuth API can be used to login with Facebook and obtain a Facebook-specific user ID (and other data like name, email, friends, etc.) but that only solves a part of the problem.

Games will typically then use their own database solution (either on their own servers or a hosted cloud solution) to make things like Facebook IDs to their game-specific accounts. This mapping can be used to associate multiple authentication services to the same account, allowing a user to login with Facebook, Google, Twitter, Microsoft, or so on. That also illustrates why it's a bad idea to use the authentication provider's user id as the account id, because the same user will have completely different user ids across the various authentication providers.

The database solution used to store account metadata can also be used to store all saved game information, or a different storage service could provide that feature. It will be typical to wrap the various backend services (accounts, saved games, leaderboards, etc.) behind a single game-specific gateway API service so that the game clients only need to interact with one external platform (and don't need things like secret access keys to databases distributed with the clients!).

Note that there are also all-in-one "platforms" that provide the entirety of these services plus many others that a shipping game needs (telemetry, monetization, etc.). Larger game studios may build their own platform, like Battle.net or Steam, while smaller indie games might use something like PlayFab or GameSparks.

I would note that building out the platform for a game is a very large and serious undertaking; the effort to build out a scalable platform for a successful game can take far more time, money, and effort than building most games themselves. I'd recommend using an existing service like PlayFab, especially if you have limited experience building online games or a very small dev team (e.g. one person).