A cloud-service such as brainCloud is only as flexible as it’s identity system – and brainCloud is very flexible indeed. brainCloud separates the concepts of a User’s Profile from their Identity User Profile (also known as Player Profile)
- Contains all the information about the user and their state/progress in the app or game
- Includes statistics, entities, attributes, virtual currency balances, the state of milestones, quests, achievements, etc.
- Is local to an App/Game – not shared across games in brainCloud*
* See details on our Shared Accounts service for ways to share a single user identity across multiple apps. User Identity
- Is used to identify a user in the system, and look up their Profile
- Maybe unauthenticated (anonymous) or authenticated (GameCenter id, Facebook id, E-mail, etc.)
- A player will often have multiple identities associated with their User Profile – just as in real life, your data may be associated with your driver’s license, health number, phone number, etc.
brainCloud currently supports the following identity types:
- Anonymous
- E-mail – e-mail address + password
- Facebook id – facebook identity
- Twitter id – twitter identity
- Google Play – Google identity
- GameCenter id – iOS GameCenter identity
- Steam id – steam identity
- Universal – userid + password <- convenient during development
In addition to the above, brainCloud now supports two advanced forms of authentication:
- External Authentication – allows you to authenticate your users using an external (custom) directory service
- Shared Accounts – allows user accounts to be shared across brainCloud apps
For more information, refer to the Authentication API docs.