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.

Animate Spritesheets in a Unity 2D Game

When it comes to developing a game, at some point in time you’re going to want to animate some component within the game. These animations could be character sprites or even elements that exist as part of the background.

A few months back, I wrote a tutorial titled, Animate Spritesheets in a Phaser Game, around creating a spritesheet and then animating it within a Phaser game. Phaser is an awesome framework, but it doesn’t compare to Unity on a professional level. So what if we wanted to animate a spritesheet in Unity?

In this tutorial we’re going to see how to animate a spritesheet, the same example from the previous tutorial, but this time with Unity, animation clips, animator states, and some basic C#.

Getting Started with Unity for Creating a 2D Game

If you’ve been keeping up with the content on the MongoDB Developer Portal, you’ll know that a few of us at MongoDB (Nic Raboy, Adrienne Tacke, Karen Huaulme) have been working on a game titled Plummeting People, a Fall Guys: Ultimate Knockout tribute game. Up until now we’ve focused on game planning and part of our backend infrastructure with a user profile store.

As part of the natural progression in our development of the game and part of this tutorial series, it makes sense to get started with the actual gaming aspect, and that means diving into Unity, our game development framework.

In this tutorial, we’re going to get familiar with some of the basics behind Unity and get a sprite moving on the screen as well as handing collision. If you’re looking for how we plan to integrate the game into MongoDB, that’s going to be saved for another tutorial.

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.