feat: social presence — show live player counts and Discord Rich Presence

[Klutzleo]

Idea

Make OctaneOS feel like a living community, not a solo experience.

Features

Phase A — Anonymous player counts (no accounts needed)

• Device pings a lightweight endpoint on GameOctane.com when a game launches/exits
• ES queries the count when hovering a game tile
• Shows something like "3 people playing this right now"
• No login, no accounts, just anonymous presence

Phase B — Discord Rich Presence

• When a game is running, push status to Discord via Rich Presence API
• Shows "Playing Final Fantasy IX on OctaneOS" in the user's Discord status automatically
• Relatively low implementation effort, high visibility for the platform

Phase C — Friends + invites

• Requires GameOctane.com accounts
• Friend list, game invites, netplay matchmaking
• Long-term goal, depends on backend infrastructure

Notes

• Phase A is the highest impact / lowest effort — no accounts, just a counter
• Streetpass covers local/passive discovery; this covers the online side
• Phase A could ship alongside the GameOctane app in Phase 2

[Klutzleo]

Maybe looking into RA API to see if we can pull numbers from there?

[Klutzleo]

Proposal: RA-powered activity ticker + Discord Rich Presence

Verified against the current RA API docs (api-docs.retroachievements.org) — no per-user OAuth/permission grant needed for any of this, since RA profiles are public by default.

1. Global "living platform" ticker (zero setup, day-one)

API_GetRecentGameAwards is a site-wide feed, not scoped to any one user — auth is just our own y key. It returns milestone-level events (beaten-softcore, beaten-hardcore, completed, mastered) with User, GameTitle, ConsoleName, AwardDate. That's already curated to "notable" moments rather than every trivial achievement pop, which is what you want for a ticker — "xXRetroFanXx just mastered Chrono Trigger" reads a lot better than a firehose of individual unlocks.

This alone gets us a moving, alive-feeling ticker with zero OctaneOS userbase required, since it rides RA's whole community from launch.

2. Opt-in "OctaneOS players" filtered view

API_GetUserRecentAchievements takes our y key + their u (username) + m (lookback minutes) — no token from them, just their RA username. If someone types their RA username into a GameOctane profile field (no "authorize this app" flow, just a text field), we can poll their recent unlocks specifically and show a "your friends" or "Octane players" filtered ticker alongside the global one.

3. Discord Rich Presence (Phase B from the original writeup)

Still the cheapest "feels alive" win and doesn't depend on scale at all — "Playing Final Fantasy IX on OctaneOS" shows up in a single user's own Discord status the moment they play, regardless of how many other Octane owners exist yet.

4. Surface it in the mode we already have

README already describes docked mode switching the Octane screen to "cover art and achievement notification mode." The ticker is a natural fit for that existing surface instead of a new screen — docked/idle state becomes the "ambient community" view.

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What I'd flag before building

• Don't ship the API key on-device. RA's own docs say "store your API key as though it is a secret... avoid checking it into your code." If every Octane unit embeds the same key, it's a shared secret leaked to every owner. Proxy this through a GameOctane.com backend endpoint instead (we already have backend infra there for OTA) — devices call us, we call RA with the one server-side key.
• No documented rate limit / fair-use policy. The docs don't publish a number, which means we should be conservative and cache aggressively server-side (e.g. poll GetRecentGameAwards once centrally on an interval, fan out to all devices from our own cache) rather than having every device or every request hit RA directly.
• Private profiles. Some users set their RA profile to private — GetUserRecentAchievements for those accounts will presumably return nothing/blocked. Need a graceful "no data" state for the opt-in view, not an error.
• Ties into Streetpass. Worth stating explicitly in this issue: Streetpass covers local/offline presence, this ticker covers online/global presence — together they're the two halves of "living platform," and probably worth linking as companion features rather than separate epics.

Net suggested build order: (1) global ticker via GetRecentGameAwards behind a GameOctane.com proxy/cache — cheapest, no accounts, immediate — then (2) Discord Rich Presence, then (3) opt-in per-user filtered view once there's a username-linking flow in the GameOctane app.

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