¶ Overview
Referral rewards are a great way to encourage your players to share your game. With HypeHype’s Player Info & Social Actions nodes it is possible to get and use info about who is sharing your game and who is coming to your game from those shares giving you a variety of ways to reward players for sharing your game.
¶ Referral Rewards Premade
The easiest way to add Referral Rewards to your game is with the Share game sign with popup and referral rewards pre-made. Add it from the Asset Library and follow the included instructions to connect it to your game's logic.
If you'd like to build the system for yourself and better understand how it works keep reading.
¶ How to Add Referral Rewards to Your Game
¶ Referral Count Check
The first part of our logic will be a check to see if the player has any referrals to redeem. For this we need 4 nodes: Player Info, Number, Math Operator & Compare
¶ Steps
- Select the Player Info Node and drag a link from Own share referral count to Value A of the Math Operator.
- Select the Number Node & name it Redeemed Referrals. This Number Node will save any referrals the player has already redeemed
- Drag a link from the Number Node output to Value B of the Math Operator
- Select the Math Operator and change the the operation to subtract
- Drag a link from the Math Operator Value Output to Value A of the Compare Node
- Select the Compare Node and set Value B to 0 and set the Operation to Greater Than
Now this Compare Node is checking if the player has referrals to redeem each time it is executed. Next let’s set up our UI.
¶ User Interfaces
There are a variety of different ways you could create and display the info about your referral rewards. In this example we have 3 different popups created with User Interface nodes.
¶ Share Popup
This popup appears when the player has no referrals to redeem. It should give some info about how the referral rewards work, what the rewards are and a button to share the game.
¶ Rewards Popup
This popup appears when the player has rewards to redeem. It should tell the players how many referrals they have to redeem and include a button to redeem the rewards.
¶ Thanks Popup
This popup appears after the button has been pressed on either of the previous popups. It should thank the player for sharing the game and encourage them to check back in to claim their rewards. This could also include buttons to prompt other social interactions.
¶ User Interface Node
Check out the User Interface Node entry to learn more about creating your own User Interfaces.
¶ Rewards Logic
Next we will set up the rewards logic. How this will work for your game depends heavily on what kind of rewards you want to give and how your systems to support them work. In this example we will be using the resource system from the Skin Shop Template that includes Coins & Gems as collectable resources saved in a Function Source.
For this part we’ll need to add 4 more Nodes: Social Actions, Math Operator, Number & Function Caller
¶ Steps
- Select the Social Actions Node and drag a link from On Shared to turn on the visibility of the Thanks Popup. This will thank the player after they’ve copied the share link
- Select the Function Caller and set the Reference Object to be the Resource System Function Container
- Select the Redeemed Referrals Number Node from the referral count check logic and drag it’s Output to Value A of the Math Operator and the Value input of the new Number node.
- Select the Math Operator, this will be the amount of coins the player is rewarded for each referral. In our example we will give 100 coins for each referral so we’ll set Value B to 100 and set the Operation to Multiply.
- Drag a link from the Math Operator Value Output to the Add Coins input of the Function Caller
- Select the Number Node, this will be the number of gems the player is rewarded. In our example we are giving 1 gem for each referral so a simple number Node is enough. If we wanted to give multiple gems we would use a Math Operator just like we did for coins in steps 4, 5 & 6.
- Drag a link from the Number Node Value output to the Add Gems input of the Function Caller.
- Also drag a link from the Number Node Value output to the Value of the Redeemed Referrals Value and set the link Operation to Add. This updates the number of redeemed referrals, if you are using a math operator for both coins and gems you will need an additional Number Node to hold the current amount of referrals that are being redeemed to use for this step.
- Select the Math Operator from the referral count check logic. Drag a link from the Value Output to Value A of the coin amount Math Operator and to the Value input of the Number Node
With this we have the system to give the referral rewards, just a few more links and our system will be working.
¶ Connect Popups
Now that the rest of the logic is set-up we can connect our User Interface nodes to it.
¶ Steps
- Select the Compare node from the referral count check logic.
- Drag a link from the On True output to turn on the visibility of the Redeem Popup. This opens the redeem panel if the player has referrals to redeem.
- Drag a link from the On False output to turn on the visibility of the Share Popup. This opens the share panel if the player has no referrals to redeem
- Select the Math Operator from the referral count check logic and drag a link from Value Output to the Text input of the Redeem Popup. This will display the number of available referrals to the player when they open the Redeem Popup. Note: The text input for the UI text component needs to be enabled in the UI node editor when setting up the popup.
- Select the Share Popup
- Drag a link from the Button On Start to the Prompt to Share input of the Social Actions Node
- Drag a link from the Button On Start to turn off the visibility of the Share Popup
- Select the Redeem Popup
- Drag a link from the Button On Start to execute the coin amount Math Operator
- Drag a link from the Button On Start to execute the gem amount Number Node
- Drag a link from the Button On Start to turn on the visibility of the Thanks Popup
- Drag a link from the Button On Start to turn off the visibility of the Redeem Popup
Our logic chain is almost ready. In the next step we’ll set up a trigger to initiate the referral rewards flow.
¶ The Trigger
The next thing we need is a way to initiate the share flow so we can begin testing. There are a wide variety of ways to do this but a very popular one in many HypeHype games is an area trigger. When the player walks into the designated area the appropriate popup will appear. For this we’ll need to add a Collision Detector Node and an object to act as the area trigger. In this example we are using the object Rounded Corners Selector to visually identify the area to the player and an invisible cube to act as the area trigger.
¶ Steps
- Place the Rounded Corners Selector where you want it. In its Physical properties set the Sensor toggle to on.
- Place the Cube in the center of the Rounded Corners Selector. In its Physical properties set the Sensor toggle to on. In its Visual properties set the Visible toggle to off
- Select the Collision Detector
- Set the Target object to be the invisible cube
- Set the Trigger with Group to Green, this is the color group for all player premades
- Drag a link from On Collision Start to execute the Compare Node in the referral count check logic. Now the referral rewards logic is initiated when the player enters the area
- Drag a link from On Collision End to turn off the visibility of all 3 popups. This ensures that no popups remain open when the player exits the area.
At this point our logic chain should be working, just two more important things and it’s ready for release.
¶ Player Save Settings
When rewarding players it’s very important to ensure you are saving any critical data related to the rewards. This ensures that the player keeps their rewards between sessions. In this example we have 3 critical Number nodes that need to be saved.
Player Save Settings are found in the Logic tab of the Toolbar.
Select the Number tab and find the nodes you want to save. In this example those nodes are the Gem & Coins nodes found in the resource system and the Redeemed Referrals node from the logic chain we just created.
Note: it’s important to name your nodes so you can find the right ones in Player Save Settings.
¶ Test
Now everything should be working but before we release it’s always important to test our logic to make sure.
In this case we’ll need to add one extra node to fake the increasing amount of referrals. Temporarily replace the Player Info Node with a Number node so that you can manually increase the number of referrals between tests. This will ensure that your calculations and rewards are working properly over multiple sessions.
When testing try to think of ways the flow could fail and try to break it. Once you are happy with the results get rid of the number node and reconnect the Player Info Node where it belongs. Now your Referral Rewards System is ready to release.