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.

Implement the Konami Keystroke Cheat Code in a Unity Game

Remember all the cheat codes you could use in old-school games back in the day? Remember the Konami cheat code? Ever wonder how you could add cheat codes to your own games?

Adding cheat codes to your game is a great way to leave your imprint. Think easter eggs, but even more secretive.

In this tutorial we’re going to see how to add keystroke driven cheat codes to a game built with Unity and C#. While the Konami cheat code will be the basis of this example, a lot of the logic and ideas can be applied to other aspects of your game.

Building a Space Shooter Game that Syncs with Unity and MongoDB Realm

When developing a game, in most circumstances you’re going to need to store some kind of data. It could be the score, it could be player inventory, it could be where they are located on a map. The possibilities are endless and it’s more heavily dependent on the type of game.

Need to sync that data between devices and your remote infrastructure? That is a whole different scenario.

If you managed to catch MongoDB .Live 2021, you’ll be familiar that the first stable release of the MongoDB Realm SDK for Unity was made available. This means that you can use Realm in your Unity game to store and sync data with only a few lines of code.

In this tutorial, we’re going to build a nifty game that explores some storage and syncing use-cases.

Get Hyped: Using Docker + Go with MongoDB

In the developer community, ensuring your projects run accurately regardless of the environment can be a pain. Whether it’s trying to recreate a demo from an online tutorial or working on a code review, hearing the words, “Well, it works on my machine…” can be frustrating. Instead of spending hours debugging, we want to introduce you to a platform that will change your developer experience: Docker.

Docker is a great tool to learn because it provides developers with the ability for their applications to be used easily between environments, and it’s resource-efficient in comparison to virtual machines. This tutorial will gently guide you through how to navigate Docker, along with how to integrate Go on the platform. We will be using this project to connect to our previously built MongoDB Atlas Search Cluster made for using Synonyms in Atlas Search. Stay tuned for a fun read on how to learn all the above while also expanding your Gen-Z slang knowledge from our synonyms cluster. Get hyped!