Introduction to Party
Overview
AccelByte Gaming Services (AGS) Party 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 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.
Key concepts
It is important to understand the key concepts used in the design of AGS Party.
Party and Friends
A party revolves 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. However, players can also invite one another to parties by sharing temporary Party Codes.
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 Presence
One of the best ways to get players to discover their friends' activities is by taking advantage of Presence, either through the native platform or AGS Presence. When done properly, players will be able to discover and join their friends' parties directly in the platform's dashboard without needing to have a game running.
AGS Party currently supports the native platform's Presence integration of Steam, Xbox, and PlayStation.
When configured properly, AGS Session will synchronize player parties with the native platform via their respective Web APIs (e.g., Steam's Lobby APIs).