Developing a Side-Scrolling Platformer Game with Unity and MongoDB Realm

I’ve been a gamer since the 1990s, so 2D side-scrolling platformer games like Super Mario Bros. hold a certain place in my heart. Today, 2D games are still being created, but with the benefit of having connectivity to the internet, whether that be to store your player state information, to access new levels, or something else.

Every year, MongoDB holds an internal company-wide hackathon known as Skunkworks. During Skunkworks, teams are created and using our skills and imagination, we create something to make MongoDB better or something that uses MongoDB in a neat way. For Skunkworks 2020, I (Nic Raboy) teamed up with Barry O’Neill to create a side-scrolling platformer game with Unity that queries and sends data between MongoDB and the game. Internally, this project was known as The Untitled Leafy Game.

In this tutorial, we’re going to see what went into creating a game like The Untitled Leafy Game using Unity as the game development framework and MongoDB Realm for data storage and back end.

My Activity Report For 2020

It’s that time of year again. It is time to reflect on the things that happened on The Polyglot Developer, what went well, what didn’t go so well, and what the upcoming year looks like.

If this is your first time stumbling on an annual report article for The Polyglot Developer, you won’t find any tutorial content. This is mostly a numbers-based reflection, but it could be useful if you’re interested in building your own blog, video channel, or overall brand.

In this particular activity report, we’ll follow the same formula as the 2019 report, which includes analyzing the written content on the blog, video tutorials on YouTube, the podcast and Twitch channel, and any services and operating costs required to keep the channels alive.

Client-Side Field Level Encryption (CSFLE) in MongoDB with Golang

One of the many great things about MongoDB is how secure you can make your data in it. In addition to network and user-based rules, you have encryption of your data at rest, encryption over the wire, and now recently, client-side encryption known as client-side field level encryption (CSFLE).

So, what exactly is client-side field level encryption (CSFLE) and how do you use it?

With field level encryption, you can choose to encrypt certain fields within a document, client-side, while leaving other fields as plain text. This is particularly useful because when viewing a CSFLE document with the CLI, Compass, or directly within Altas, the encrypted fields will not be human readable. When they are not human readable, if the documents should get into the wrong hands, those fields will be useless to the malicious user. However, when using the MongoDB language drivers while using the same encryption keys, those fields can be decrypted and are queryable within the application.

In this quick start themed tutorial, we’re going to see how to use MongoDB field level encryption with the Go programming language (Golang). In particular, we’re going to be exploring automatic encryption rather than manual encryption.

Visually Showing Atlas Search Highlights with JavaScript and HTML

When it comes to finding specific words or phrases within text, you’re probably going to want to use a natural language search option like full-text search (FTS). Sure, you could probably create a complicated and difficult-to-maintain set of regular expressions to search within text, but that is an option that most developers don’t want. Not to mention it won’t cover the full scope of what a natural language processor typically accomplishes.

In a previous tutorial titled Building an Autocomplete Form Element with Atlas Search and JavaScript, I wrote about searching for recipes, as they are being typed, in MongoDB Atlas using the autocomplete operator. While this tutorial accomplished the job quite well, it didn’t elaborate on what exactly was being matched for any given term.

In this tutorial, we’re going to see how to use Atlas Search and work with the highlight data to visually show any matches on the terms in a user facing application. Highlighting is a powerful tool with Search to allow your users to find the exact text that they want in its proper context.

Sending and Requesting Data from MongoDB in a Unity Game

Are you working on a game in Unity and finding yourself needing to make use of a database in the cloud? Storing your data locally works for a lot of games, but there are many gaming scenarios where you’d need to leverage an external database. Maybe you need to submit your high score for a leaderboard, or maybe you need to save your player stats and inventory so you can play on numerous devices. There are too many reasons to list as to why a remote database might make sense for your game.

If you’ve been keeping up with the content publishing on the MongoDB Developer Hub and our Twitch channel, you’ll know that I’m working on a game development series with Adrienne Tacke. This series is centered around creating a 2D multiplayer game with Unity that uses MongoDB as part of the online component. Up until now, we haven’t actually had the game communicate with MongoDB.

In this tutorial, we’re going to see how to make HTTP requests from a Unity game to a back end that communicates with MongoDB. The back end was already developed in a tutorial titled, Creating a User Profile Store for a Game With Node.js and MongoDB. We’re now going to leverage it in our game.

Designing and Developing 2D Game Levels with Unity and C#

If you’ve been keeping up with the game development series that me (Nic Raboy) and Adrienne Tacke have been creating, you’ve probably seen how to create a user profile store for a game and move a player around on the screen with Unity.

To continue with the series, which is also being streamed on Twitch, we’re at a point where we need to worry about designing a level for gameplay rather than just exploring a blank screen.

In this tutorial, we’re going to see how to create a level, which can also be referred to as a map or world, using simple C# and the Unity Tilemap Editor.

Block Ads at a Network Level with Pi-Hole and an Ubiquiti EdgeRouter

Advertisements are incredibly annoying, and I’m saying this as someone who relies on them for income on The Polyglot Developer. Even with ad providers such as Google saying that they’re working to provide a better experience, things seem to be getting worse. You could use tools like Adblock Plus in the browser, but what about mobile devices? Better yet, what about all the websites out there that detect when an ad blocker is being used and make the browsing experience even worse by denying access?

To get beyond these advertisement related problems, you’re going to need to handle things from a network level, not a per device level.

In this tutorial we’re going to see how to configure Pi-Hole, a popular network level ad blocking solution. For this example we’re going to use it with a Raspberry Pi and an Ubiquiti EdgeRouter, even though other networking hardware can be substituted.