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Saving progress in HTML5 games

A topic by chicxulub created Feb 06, 2020 Views: 544
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HTML5 games are great for removing the download-unzip-run barrier but it's a challenge to save game state/user ID as they run in an iframe pointing to a different domain than itch.io. Safari already blocks third party cookies and website data, and Chrome has plans to do the same. If HTML5 games are to be more than 5-minute prototypes/demos, I think some way of saving state is essential.

I can think of 2 ways:

  • Serve the iframe from an itch.io subdomain - this should allow cookies with a user ID or putting game state in local storage, though I'm not sure about the security consequences, e.g. games accessing itch.io session cookies.
  • Attach a signed auth token as a query parameter to the iframe URL so the game can identify the user anonymously and can save to its own backend.

Are there any other ways?