Buying lives with coins

[richard]

We want to implement a lives system in our game, similar to these screenshots from Candy Crush Saga.
Ideally this would be in the marketplace - having a Coins virtual currency and a Lives VC,
But it doesn't seem to be possible. What alternative implementation would work?
thanks

[JasonL]

You can keep using the brainCloud VC system for the user’s Coins, but track their lives using User Entities that store the Lives count and timestamps, etc.. This gives you more control and flexibility over your Lives system.

[richard]

In future we want our store to have a catalog including life packs, cosmetics, badges etc.
To avoid complicating the client, if we defined items in the catalog such as '3 lives pack', '5 lives pack', is there a suitable Cloud Code API hook where we could update the User Entities as you suggest when the user completes a purchase?

[Paul Winterhalder]

HI @richard - we're currently working on a feature that will handle this directly for brainCloud 5.9.

In the meantime, an interim approach would be to:

• Manage the Lives in a virtual currency.
• In the item catalog - you can indicate the currencies to award from the offer via the extra data JSON.
• And create a post-hook on PurchaseUserItem - calling a script to award the appropriate currencies - and immediately consume the new "item" that was purchased...

Just a thought...

[But yeah - we're going to have a more direct solution in 5.9 - which is currently targeted for November release.]

Paul.