I didn’t think I’d get the opportunity to make something for Devember this year as I’ve been traveling for work, but I did actually make something since the event started, and thought it would be fun to post it and improve on it.
My idea for a devember this year is to make a web based “Leaderboard” or high score board that I could use while developing games to collect high scores from players and show players how they rank globally.
While I’ve already implemented the base functionality for this, my goal for Devember is to extend the idea and develop a web front end for developers.
I came upon this while making a 2048 clone as a learning project and realized that I wanted some form of leaderboard for the game. I’ve since released the game:
During game development I had planned on using an existing web service called dreamlo, but as I was testing everything I realized that dreamlo requires a donation to enable HTTPS. HTTPS is critical, since I’m hosting the web based game on an HTTPS site, and making non secure REST calls while on an HTTPS site is a CORS violation and is blocked by default on all browsers.
While I was happy with the idea of donating, I realized that I already have a Linode instance that could handle a small service like this, I had some time to try to put something together myself, and I liked the idea of doing a simple project with SQL as I had not done very much with SQL and it seemed like a good learning opportunity.
I have already made the bulk of the service (made about a week and a half ago), and while making it I committed some fake usernames I was using (I usually use my own git server, not GitHub, so I wasn’t terribly worried about that). In the interest of not making even fake usernames available to the public, I created a new repo with the code and committed it to GitHub for everyone to see:
The service currently utilizes REST for all queries, and stores data in a MySQL based database. It is a Java application, and uses JDBC to connect to the database. I used the JavaSpark framework to implement REST functionality as it is extremely easy to use.
I built this project so that it could support any number of leaderboards, not just what I needed for this project. My goal for the rest of Devember then is to expand on this project, document what I have a little better, and make a web front end that developers could use to create a leaderboard and build this functionality into their own games.