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.

Creating a User Profile Store for a Game With Node.js and MongoDB

When it comes to game development, or at least game development that has an online component to it, you’re going to stumble into the territory of user profile stores. These are essentially records for each of your players and these records contain everything from account information to what they’ve accomplished in the game.

Take the game Plummeting People that some of us at MongoDB (Karen Huaulme, Adrienne Tacke, and Nic Raboy) are building, streaming, and writing about. The idea behind this game, as described in a previous article, is to create a Fall Guys: Ultimate Knockout tribute game with our own spin on it.

Since this game will be an online multiplayer game, each player needs to retain game-play information such as how many times they’ve won, what costumes they’ve unlocked, etc. This information would exist inside a user profile document.

In this tutorial, we’re going to see how to design a user profile store and then build a backend component using Node.js and MongoDB Realm for interacting with it.

Designing a Strategy to Develop a Game with Unity and MongoDB

When it comes to game development, you should probably have some ideas written down before you start writing code or generating assets. The same could probably be said about any kind of development, unless of course you’re just messing around and learning something new.

So what should be planned before developing your next game?

Depending on the type of game, you’re probably going to want a playable frontend, otherwise known as the game itself, some kind of backend if you want an online component such as multiplayer, leaderboards, or similar, and then possibly a web-based dashboard to get information at a glance if you’re on the operational side of the game and not a player.

Adrienne Tacke, Karen Huaulme, and myself (Nic Raboy) are in the process of building a game. We think Fall Guys: Ultimate Knockout is a very well-made game and thought it’d be interesting to create a tribute game that is a little more on the retro side, but with a lot of the same features. The game will be titled, Plummeting People. This article explores the planning, design, and development process!

Maintaining a Geolocation Specific Game Leaderboard with Phaser and MongoDB

When it comes to game development, an often forgotten component comes in the form of a database for storing gameplay information. The database can contribute to numerous roles, such as storing user profile information, game state, and so much more.

In fact, I created a previous tutorial titled Creating a Multiplayer Drawing Game with Phaser and MongoDB. In this drawing example, every brushstroke made was stored in MongoDB.

In this tutorial, we’re going to look at a different data component for a game. We’re going to explore leaderboards and some of the neat things you can do with them. Like my other tutorial, we’ll be using Phaser and JavaScript.

Building an Autocomplete Form Element with Atlas Search and JavaScript

When you’re developing a web application, a quality user experience can make or break your application. A common application feature is to allow users to enter text into a search bar to find a specific piece of information. Rather than having the user enter information and hope it’s valid, you can help your users find what they are looking for by offering autocomplete suggestions as they type.

So what could go wrong?

If your users are like me, they’ll make multiple spelling mistakes for every one word of text. If you’re creating an autocomplete field using regular expressions on your data, programming to account for misspellings and fat fingers is tough!

In this tutorial, we’re going to see how to create a simple web application that surfaces autocomplete suggestions to the user. These suggestions can be easily created using the full-text search features available in Atlas Search.

Creating a Multiplayer Drawing Game with Phaser and MongoDB

When it comes to MongoDB, an often overlooked industry that it works amazingly well in is gaming. It works great in gaming because of its performance, but more importantly its ability to store whatever complex data the game throws at it.

Let’s say you wanted to create a drawing game like Pictionary. I know what you’re thinking: why would I ever want to create a Pictionary game with MongoDB integration? Well, what if you wanted to be able to play with friends remotely? In this scenario, you could store your brushstrokes in MongoDB and load those brushstrokes on your friend’s device. These brushstrokes can be pretty much anything. They could be images, vector data, or something else entirely.

A drawing game is just one of many possible games that would pair well with MongoDB.

In this tutorial, we’re going to create a drawing game using Phaser. The data will be stored and synced with MongoDB and be visible on everyone else’s device whether that is desktop or mobile.

Searching for Nearby Points of Interest with MongoDB and Mapbox

When it comes to location data, MongoDB’s ability to work with GeoJSON through geospatial queries is often under-appreciated. Being able to query for intersecting or nearby coordinates while maintaining performance is functionality a lot of organizations are looking for.

Take the example of maintaining a list of business locations or even a fleet of vehicles. Knowing where these locations are, relative to a particular position isn’t an easy task when doing it manually.

In this tutorial we’re going to explore the $near operator within a MongoDB Realm application to find stored points of interest within a particular proximity to a position. These points of interest will be rendered on a map using the Mapbox service.