Custom games

Most customers embed a game from the marketplace. If you would rather run your own game, you can register a custom game: a game you host yourself, identified by an id you choose, instead of picking one from the catalog.

This page is an overview of what a custom game is and what it takes to use one. Authoring a game in depth (writing the game, its schema, and its replay) is covered separately.

Registering a custom game

On a site key's (or the troop's) Games page, use the Custom game input in the Add a game panel: enter an id and click Define. Unlike a marketplace game, a custom game has no author manifest, so you define its schema yourself in the editor (the fields each preset can set) and then author presets against it.

A custom game id can be any GitHub-repo-style string. If you choose an id that also exists in the marketplace, your custom game takes priority for that id; Caputchin warns you at the time and never silently serves the marketplace game instead.

Hosting and the replay artifact

You host the playable game yourself and point the widget at it with the game-src attribute. To use a custom game as a verification gate, Caputchin also needs a replay artifact: a small headless version of the game it can re-run to confirm a result. You upload that on the game's Settings tab. Until a replay artifact is uploaded and passes its check, a custom game shows as Not replayable and cannot gate a site key.

Presets and skin assets

A custom game's language, skin, and configuration presets resolve and apply at runtime exactly as a marketplace game's do, on the same plan tiers (see the overview). The only difference is where the field schema comes from: you author it in the dashboard rather than inheriting it from a marketplace manifest.

One caveat: because you host the playable game yourself, reference any image, audio, or video your skin presets use by absolute URL. There is no platform bundle to resolve a relative asset path against.

See also

• Game customization overview: registering and managing games.
• Games and the game gate: requiring a game to verify, and the replayability requirement.
• Schema reference: the field types you author a custom schema from.