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!

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.

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.

Real-Time Location Changes with MongoDB Realm, Change Streams, and Mapbox

When it comes to modern web applications, interactions often need to be done in real-time. This means that instead of periodically checking in for changes, watching or listening for changes often makes more sense.

Take the example of tracking something on a map. When it comes to package shipments, device tracking, or anything else where you need to know the real-time location, watching for those changes in location is great. Imagine needing to know where your fleet is so that you can dispatch them to a nearby incident?

When it comes to MongoDB, watching for changes can be done through change streams. These change streams can be used in any of the drivers, including front-end applications with MongoDB Realm.

In this tutorial, we’re going to leverage MongoDB Realm change streams. When the location data in our NoSQL documents change, we’re going to update the information on an interactive map powered by Mapbox.

Web Services for the Go Developer, First Edition

I’m pleased to announce that my eBook titled, Web Services for the Go Developer, has been published! This is my second book and was inspired by my previous book with nearly the same name that focused on JavaScript development rather than Go development.

So what is the objective of this book?

It is important for developers to be familiar with web services that follow the GraphQL or REST specification, not only from the perspective of using those web services, but also in designing and developing them. The objective of this book is to teach Go developers, through example, how to do just that.

Developing A GraphQL API With Node.js And MongoDB

While REST APIs are amongst the most popular when it comes to client consumption, they are not the only way to consume data and they aren’t always the best way. For example, having to deal with many endpoints or endpoints that return massive amounts of data that you don’t need are common. This is where GraphQL comes in.

With GraphQL you can query your API in the same sense that you would query a database. You write a query, define the data you want returned, and you get what you requested. Nothing more, nothing less. I actually had the opportunity to interview the co-creator of GraphQL on my podcast in an episode titled, GraphQL for API Development, and in that episode we discuss GraphQL at a high level.

You might remember that I wrote a tutorial titled, Getting Started with GraphQL Development Using Node.js which focused on mock data and no database. This time around we’re going to take a look at including MongoDB as our NoSQL data layer.

Developing A RESTful API With Golang And A MongoDB NoSQL Database

If you’ve been following along, you’re probably familiar with my love of Node.js and the Go programming language. Over the past few weeks I’ve been writing a lot about API development with MongoDB and Node.js, but did you know that MongoDB also has an official SDK for Golang? As of now the SDK is in beta, but at least it exists and is progressing.

The good news is that it isn’t difficult to develop with the Go SDK for MongoDB and you can accomplish quite a bit with it.

In this tutorial we’re going to take a look at building a simple REST API that leverages the Go SDK for creating data and querying in a MongoDB NoSQL database.