Introduction to Party
Overview
The AccelByte Gaming Services (AGS) Party service enables the creation and management of player parties. A party is an in-game temporary group that a player can start and invite their friends to join. Parties allow players and their friends to self-organize (using chat or shared data) and join a game session together through methods like matchmaking or session browsers.
A party in AGS Party is a special type of AGS session with joinability set to be invite-only. Given that a party is a session, the game will be able to use all capabilities of AGS Session, such as being able to set the minimum and maximum number of players programmatically.
Read more about AGS Session here.
Key concepts
Party and friends
Parties revolve around players forming a temporary group with their friends (or friends of friends), so AGS Party works best once you have integrated AGS Friends. Then, players can then choose their friends that they want to invite into the party from their friends list.
There is, however, another way to invite other players into a party without relying on a friends list: they can share a Party Code with other players who can use that Party Code to make a call to join the player's party.
// Code snippet coming soon
Read more about AGS Friends here.
Party and matchmaking
AGS Matchmaking allows the party leader to submit a ticket on behalf of their party. Matchmaking will honor the party and ensure the party members will not be split into different teams.
See the flow of matchmaking that's triggered by a party leader here.
Party and native platform Presence integration
One of the best ways to get players to discover their friends' activities is by having the integration with the native platform's Presence system. When done properly, players will be able to discover and join their friends' parties directly in the Platform Dashboard without having the Game to even be running.
AGS Party currently supports the native platform's Presence integration on Steam, Xbox, and PlayStation.
When configured properly, the AGS Session service will be synchronizing player parties with the native platform via their respective Web APIs (for example: Steam's Lobby APIs).