Privacy

The short version

• You can play without an account. Nothing on this page about accounts applies until you make one.
• An account stores your e-mail address, a display name and which character you picked. Nothing else - there are no purchases and no payment details anywhere in this project.
• The game keeps a short technical log (sessions, matches, connection results, crashes) so I can tell what is broken. It is deleted after about three months.
• Multiplayer is peer-to-peer, which means the other players in your room can see your IP address. That is how the technology works and it is the one thing worth reading the long version about.
• You can delete your account yourself, from your profile page, at any moment.

What an account stores

Signing up creates one row about you:

• Your e-mail address, and a password you never send me in readable form - Supabase Auth stores it hashed and I cannot see it.
• A display name, which is public: it is what other players see next to your name in a match, and what appears as the author of a map or building you publish.
• Which of the nine characters you play as - an index, nothing more.
• When the account was created and when you last signed in.

There is no address, no phone number, no date of birth, no payment detail. The game is free and there is nothing to bill.

Things you publish

Maps, buildings and ideas you publish are public by design - that is the point of publishing them - and each is stored with your account as its owner, so the site can show your name on it and let you edit or delete it later.

Votes on the idea board are the exception: who voted for what is private, visible only to you. The public number on an idea is a count, not a list.

The technical log

The game reports a small set of events so that I can see what is failing for real players instead of guessing. Each record is a timestamp, an event name, and a little context:

• client.start, session.end, match.end - that the game was opened, and how long a session or a match lasted.
• room.create, room.join, room.close - that a multiplayer room existed, and how a connection was established (direct, or through a fallback). This is what tells me whether players can actually connect to each other.
• client.error - that something threw, with the error message truncated to 200 characters.
• map.publish and the idea board's own actions, so there is a trace of who published what.

If you are signed in, these records carry your account id, and you can read your own - the numbers on your profile page are built from them. If you are not signed in, they carry no identity at all.

What is not in this log: no IP addresses, no page-by-page browsing history, no content of your saved worlds. Saved worlds never leave your own browser (see below). The hosting providers below keep their own request logs, which do contain IP addresses, as every web server does.

Multiplayer and your IP address

Shveeskay's multiplayer is peer-to-peer: your game talks straight to the other players' games, with no game server in the middle. That is what makes it free to run and low-latency - and it has a consequence you should know about.

• To open a direct connection, the players in a room exchange their network addresses, so the other people in your room can learn your IP address. Any peer-to-peer game, voice chat or file transfer works this way; there is no version of it where a direct connection happens without both ends knowing where to send the packets.
• Setting up a connection asks a public STUN server (currently Google's) what your public address looks like from outside your network. It receives your IP address for that purpose and nothing else.
• A small signaling server hands out room codes and passes the connection details between players. When two players' networks cannot open a direct link, their traffic falls back to going through that server instead - in which case it does carry their gameplay messages, without storing them.
• Only play in rooms with people you are willing to share that with. A private room code is what keeps strangers out.

Cookies, and what stays on your device

This site sets no advertising or tracking cookies. What it does set:

• A session cookie once you sign in, which is what keeps you signed in.
• A language cookie, remembering which language you read the site in.

The game itself stores things in your browser's own storage, which never reaches me: your settings, key bindings and saved survival worlds all live on your device. Clearing your browser's site data deletes your saved worlds - there is no cloud copy to restore them from.

Page views on this site are counted by Vercel Analytics, which is aggregate and cookie-less: it does not build a profile of you and cannot follow you to another site.

Who else handles it

I run none of this hardware myself. Four companies process data on my behalf:

• Supabase - the database and the accounts. Hosted in the EU (Frankfurt).
• Vercel - this website, and its aggregate page-view counts.
• Render - the signaling server that brokers multiplayer rooms. Hosted in the EU (Frankfurt).
• GitHub - where the desktop installers are published. Downloading one is a request to GitHub, so they see it.

Each of them keeps ordinary server logs of the requests they serve, including IP addresses, under their own policies.

How long things are kept

• Your account and profile - until you delete it.
• The technical log - dropped a month at a time, so nothing is older than about three months. This is automatic, not a promise I have to remember to keep.
• Maps, buildings and ideas you published - until you delete them. If you delete your account without deleting these first, they stay published with no author on them: your name comes off, the content stays. That is deliberate - other players' saved worlds can reference a published building by name, and deleting it would put a hole in somebody else's game.
• The technical log after an account is deleted - the records stay until they age out, with the link to your identity removed.

Your rights, and the delete button

Because the data sits in the EU and you probably do too, the GDPR applies and you have the usual rights: to see what is stored about you, to have it corrected, to have it deleted, to get a copy, and to complain to a supervisory authority.

Two of those you can exercise yourself, right now, without asking me:

• See it - your profile page shows your account, your numbers, and everything you have published.
• Delete it - there is a Delete account button at the bottom of your profile page. It removes your account immediately and irreversibly. Delete any maps or buildings you want gone first, while you still have an account to delete them with.

For anything else, write to privacy@shveeskay.com and I will answer.

Changes, and how to reach me

The game is in early access and changes most weeks. If a change alters what is collected, this page changes with it and the date at the top moves - that date is about the wording, so it only moves when the meaning does.

Questions, requests, or anything that reads wrong here: privacy@shveeskay.com.