At the end of 2012, I took part in a month long game jam, made a little game with Unity 3D and added some trophies and leaderboards with the GameJolt API. It's a pretty standard API where the signature is generated from the url of the action itself and a secret key, but it was a bit annoying to have to deal with it the middle of the game code and I eventually made a wrapper for it in order to abstract away all the complexity. Realising it could be useful to other, I offered it to download on the site.
Fast forward to mid-2015, I released a new version with all sorts of improvements, complete support of the API and a highly demanded default UI for busy developers. In addition, I made the project open-source which proved to be an insightful journey into managing user feedback and critics, accepting contribution and managing the evolution of the project (e.g. how to handle deprecation warnings, considering how each change will affect other developers and not just me).
Around that same time, the project was made the official package for Unity 3D games on GameJolt which brought a lot more support requests but at the same time helped identify which areas needed to be improved.
At the end of 2017, the package had been downloaded 5,000 times, was followed by 300 developers and had an average rating of 4.83/5 (out of 220+ ratings). Unfortunately this is also the time were life twists and turns took me away from game development (even as a hobby) but luckily I was able to find a talented developer to take over and make sure developers can continue making great games because they can focus on gameplay and not on some API implementation.
