Hey! I just found out about the JavaScript API.
For those who don’t know, if you go to a game’s page and add “/data.json” to the URL, you can retrieve some basic information about a game.
It would be amazing if my future games could use the information returned here to inform the user when the game has an update available to download from itch.io. The data currently returned simply doesn’t have any great place for me to put this information.
I have multiple ideas for how this could be implemented on itch.io’s side:
- Include the names of all the files that are attached to the game in the data.json (either file name, or display name, or both). I usually add version numbers to my file names anyway, so having this information available would be enough for my games to parse it.
- Alternatively, return the description or short description text in data.json. Not as nice, but might be simpler to implement.
- Add a dedicated version number metadata field to games, which can be optionally filled and is then returned in the data.json request (and maybe also displayed on the game page somewhere?). Most future-proof and reliable option, but needs lots of UI adjustments.
Alternatively to the data.json endpoint, new API endpoints could be added to host this information instead.
Let me know what you think! ^^