Extract the Version Information of a Game with Unity and C#

If you play a lot of games, you probably noticed at some point in time that the version number or build number of the game is often presented clearly on the screen. This is often not by accident and is instead a way to show users that they are using the correct version of your game. Not only that, but it can help from a development perspective as well. For example, have you ever built a game and had a bunch of different builds floating around on your computer? Imagine trying to figure out which build is correct without seeing any build or version information!

In this tutorial we’re going to see how to very easily extract the build information defined in the project settings of a Unity game.

Build Your First .NET Core Application with MongoDB Atlas

So you’re a .NET Core developer or you’re trying to become one and you’d like to get a database included into the mix. MongoDB is a great choice and is quite easy to get started with for your .NET Core projects.

In this tutorial, we’re going to explore simple CRUD operations in a .NET Core application, something that will make you feel comfortable in no time!

Add Pagination to Your Eleventy Static Generated Website in Minutes

A few months ago you might remember a tutorial I put out regarding remote caching in Eleventy. In this tutorial titled, Download and Cache YouTube Data in an Eleventy Website with Simple JavaScript, I demonstrated how I was automatically gathering YouTube videos from a playlist on my Poké Trainer Nic channel and publishing them to my Eleventy website.

At the time, this was the best thing since sliced bread for that particular website. Fast forward to now and we’ve got a problem with too many videos loading all at once with a ten hour scroll to reach the bottom. The scroll time is an over exaggeration, but you get the idea that too much content on a single page can become a problem.

This lead me to pagination and showing only a small subset of videos per page.

We’re going to see how to very quickly add pagination to an Eleventy website, something that can be accomplished with a few lines of HTML and a few minutes of your time.

Create a Custom Stream Elements Overlay for YouTube Subscribers

I recently got into streaming video games on a consistent basis and needed a better call to action (CTA) to encourage subscribers. In an attempt to encourage more subscriptions, I thought it’d be beneficial to show to my viewers how many current subscriptions I had and have them watch the number increase if they choose to subscribe.

While I could just show static plain text of this, I thought it’d be more professional to have it nicely formatted and updating live. For this I stumbled upon Stream Elements.

With Stream Elements I could create web overlays to show on my stream. However, I was responsible with the design of these overlays.

In this tutorial, I’m going to share how I created a custom widget for showing total YouTube subscribers on my stream.

Interacting with Sprite and UI Buttons in a Unity Game

When you’re developing a game, whether it be 2D or 3D, you’re going to need to add menus with buttons at some point. These buttons could be as simple as a means to exit the game, or something more complex.

In the Unity game development framework, there are a few ways to accomplish buttons. You could create sprites and interact with them through mouse clicks and keyboard presses, or you could make use of the canvas and UI elements.

In this tutorial, we’re going to look at both options for creating buttons in a game.

Implement Full-Text Search over a GraphQL API in MongoDB Atlas

GraphQL can be an extremely powerful and efficient way to create APIs and MongoDB Realm makes it easy by allowing you to connect your collections to GraphQL schemas without writing a single line of code. I wrote about some of the basics behind configuring MongoDB and Realm for GraphQL in an announcement tutorial a while back.

As you find yourself needing to do more advanced things with GraphQL, you’re going to need to familiarize yourself with custom resolvers. If you can’t map collection fields to a schema from within Realm and you need to write custom logic using a serverless function instead, this is where the custom resolvers come into play. Take the example of needing to use an aggregation pipeline within MongoDB. The complex logic that you add to your aggregation pipeline isn’t something you can map. The good news is that you don’t need to abandon MongoDB Realm for these scenarios, but you can leverage Realm’s custom resolvers instead.

In this tutorial we’re going to see how to create a custom resolver that implements Atlas Search for our GraphQL API using Realm Functions, enabling you to add fast, relevant full-text search to your applications.

Download and Cache YouTube Data in an Eleventy Website with Simple JavaScript

So you want to add your YouTube videos to your static generated website, but you don’t want to manually keep track of all your videos and playlists? I get it because I’ve been there!

Take my website, Poké Trainer Nic, for example. It’s a Pokémon website built with Eleventy that shows a list of my YouTube videos among other things. The videos on the website refresh daily, but it’s not something I do manually.

So how do I do this?

In this tutorial you’ll see how to get information about your YouTube videos and playlists using APIs for displaying within an Eleventy website. To make things better, we’re going to see how to cache this data to prevent making too many requests to an API that has a finite allocation.