Help - Developers

Just about every page with useful information on this site has an XML and JSON representation, although it's not yet easily visible. Whenever you're viewing a list of arcades, games or users, just add in .xml or .json to the URL and bam! There's the formatted equivalent. This'll work with searches too. For instance, if you're looking for an xml feed of all games with "dance" in them, just head to http://arcadefly.heroku.com/games.xml?search=dance.

Whenever you're viewing a list of arcades, games or players, there are a few URL options you can use to tweak the data returned by ArcadeFly. These work both when using the API and also when using

  • per_page: Just add in a per_page parameter to tell the API how many items you want to see at once.
  • page: Which page you are on. If you're not including this, you're on page 1. This will force the starting item to be page * per_page.
  • include: Set this to "all" when viewing a list of arcades and you'll get the arcades in the same format as if you were viewing it alone. Otherwise when viewing an arcade it'll be in an abbreviated form.

Disclosure

There are a few rules to using the ArcadeFly API; but nothing out of the ordinary. You have to have some kind of link back to ArcadeFly on each page that uses data from ArcadeFly or makes a request to our API. If you're building a hugely popular system that's going to be hitting us hard, be sure contact us so we know to expect it (and can probably work out a better solution with you). Other than that just be smart in your requests! If you're wanting a list, get a list; if you're wanting a single item, request a single item.

New API Requests

APIs are based around need. I'd like to say we're using our API, but we're just using the underlying data and exposing that data via XML. For this reason the people who know best about the API are those that are consuming it. If you're working with it and realize there's some extra bit of data that would be nice to have, or there's some other listing of data that is useful, just let us know and we'll see what we can do.