Notifications

As Corridor Quest is a turn based game that has no time limits it might take some time for each player to make progress in a game. Therefore, getting a notification when something happens in a game is essential. There are various facilities available to receive notification for various events.

event types

The following event types are available:

  1. 'turn' - occurs when a game the user is a player in has progressed and it is now the user's turn.
  2. 'action' - occurs when a game the user is a player in has an action: a pawn is moved or jumped or a wall is placed.
  3. 'game' - occurs when the status of a game the user is a player in is changed (active/finished/cancelled).

notification by mail

Users had to give their mail address when they signed up. This email address is used to send the notifications. A user can enable or disable email notification for each event type:

  1. 'turn' - Default: enabled
  2. 'action' - Default: disabled
  3. 'game' - Default: enabled

notification by ntfy.sh

ntfy.sh is a notification service with clients for all major platforms. It is a pub/sub mechanism: The game service 'pub'lishes notifications on topics (like games and users) and everyone using the app can 'sub'scribe to these topics to receive notifications on them. It is a great way to receive a push notification when something happened that you want to be notified about.

The service works by subscribing to topics. When an event occurs that concerns this topic you will receive a notification of this event. Because of the nature of this service not only users can subscribe to topics but everyone else, also non-users (spectators).

The topics that the game service send notifications about are:

  • game - The topic is game_[x] where [x] is the game-id for Public games and the invitation-code for Private games.
  • user - The topic is [username]. Any game related event concerning this user will send a notification to this topic. Note: For privacy reasons, events from Private games are not published to user topics, only to the game topic. Also, messages, broadcasts and DM will not be sent to the user topics.
  • DM - Direct Messages send to you directly in a game are treated differently due to the privacy aspect of it. You are able to configure a secret DM topic on your user account (see the user documentation of the client you are using). Only if you have set this, DM's will be send to this special topic.

The events that cause a notification to a topic are the same events as described in the event types section above. They are sent to the game topic and to the username topic.

In-game messages are also sent to the game_[x] topic with a tag of 'message' and can thus also be muted seperatly if needed.

Administrators can broadcast a system-wide message to all Active and Waiting games. This will also be sent as a notification to these games.

ntfy.sh supports tagging. The following tags are used:

  • 'turn' - for events of event type 'turn'
  • 'action' - for events of event type 'action'
  • 'game' - for events of event type 'game'
  • 'message' - for in-game messages
  • 'broadcast' - for broadcast messages
  • 'invitation' - for invitations for joining a game
  • 'maintenance' - for messages that are cuased by system maintenance tasks

Ntfy.sh clients typically support different treatments per tag, such as muting. This way you can exactly configure which events get through and which not.

ntfy.sh supports priorities for notifications. Each tag has it's own priority:

  • turn: urgent
  • game: high
  • action: default
  • message: low
  • broadcast: high
  • DM: default
  • maintenance: default