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Local Development

You do not need to upload a build to work on your integration. The SDK runs on your own machine, and sign-in works there too.

Running your game locally

Serve the game over HTTP and open it in a browser. Any port, any path.

If you do not already have a server running, this works in any folder:

python3 -m http.server 8000

Then open http://localhost:8000.

Opening the file directly will not work

Double-clicking index.html, or otherwise opening it as file:///…, gives a page with no working SDK. Browsers refuse the requests it needs to make from a file:// origin, and there is nothing the SDK can do about it.

Symptoms look like a broken integration rather than a blocked one, so this is worth ruling out first. Serve the folder over HTTP instead.

Signing in while developing

Sign-in from your own machine is always allowed — localhost needs no setup at all.

Anywhere else is a different origin, and origins have to be known to Y8 before they may sign players in. That covers the cases where you are not on localhost:

  • testing on your phone,
  • running through a tunnel such as ngrok,
  • opening the game from another machine on your network.

Add the address in the Y8 Developer Portal, under your game's SDK Initialization tab, and sign-in starts working from it while you develop.

Auto sign-in is a separate matter

Players are not signed in automatically while your game runs anywhere other than its Y8 page — including localhost and registered development addresses. Your game starts anonymous there, and nothing you configure will change that.

This is not a fault in your integration. Automatic sign-in relies on a check the browser only permits from the Y8 site itself.

Signing in explicitly works exactly as it will in production: call the login method and the sign-in window opens as normal. Once your game is live on its Y8 page, automatic sign-in resumes.

So while developing, expect to press your own sign-in button. Which is worth doing anyway — most of your players will arrive signed out, and that path deserves as much testing as the signed-in one.

Before you upload

  • Play through once without signing in. Anonymous players are the majority; the game should be enjoyable for them.
  • Request an ad break twice in quick succession. The second is frequency capped, and you want to be sure that leaves the game running rather than paused.
  • Check that a failed save is visible to the player rather than silent.

Ads served while your game is in review are Google's test creatives, switched on for you automatically — there is no test flag to set and none to remember to remove later.