Rocket League has an official API

Rocket League has been a big part of my life for the past 7 years.
I started playing in 2019 and was immediately hooked.
From the outside it might look like a silly game of hitting a ball with funny cars. But scratch the surface and you find
something that is more than just a game. It’s you, a ball and how well can you control that ball.
The physics based gameplay is what makes the game so fun, so challenging and more like a proper sport than any other esport.
No buttons that make you shoot, pass or dribble. If you want to be able to do any of these things you have to learn how to manipulate the ball with your car.
And then you learn that they also fly.

I’m closing in on 6000 hours played and the reason I keep playing is not only the fun, sport aspect of the game, it’s also the social part of it.
Early on I found a community to play with. Later founded my own community. Found amateur leagues and a whole competitive scene.
I quickly wanted to engage with the scene and became involved in several organisations that ran leagues and provided stats for the professional esports scene.

I did graphics and full broadcast overlays that showed real-time match stats about the players and the scores on Twitch.

The reason this was possible to do was because of a modding tool called Bakkesmod.
This piece of software was central to the scene, even used by the official professional RLCS competition.
Among all its plugins was one in particular, SOSPlugin, that would publish match events from the game via web sockets.
This made it possible to build web and desktop apps that would run on the broadcaster’s computers, receive match data and display it however you’d like in real-time as the match was played.

It was a very fun time back then to see what people would create, the creativity of some teams and how the quality of broadcasts were raised.
Rocket League as an esport took a big leap to more professional streams.

Everything comes to an end though, and on April 28th Rocket League was updated with Easy Anti-Cheat to battle a long running war with cheaters and bots.
This meant the end of Bakkesmod, which is no longer allowed to run in online mode of Rocket League.
However it is not the end of custom broadcast overlays, as an official API was also released with the same update.
https://www.rocketleague.com/en/developer/stats-api.

SOSPlugin was not perfect. It had its quirks but it did a good job. I am happy though to see an officially maintained and documented API.
The events the game sends was never vast, so it’s not a large API but it is clearly documented and I like the docs site.
With a bit of time to move over from using SOSPlugin to the official API, the community will still be able to show their creativity and keep the Rocket League streams on a high level.

I’m itching a bit to put my own hands on the new API and build something for Rocket League again.
Maybe we’ll see something about that in the future.