Introduction has become one of the popular game engines today. You can develop cross-platform games with just a few changes in the code. If you are very much comfy in using or then Unity3D should be your choice. Unity3D JavaScript C#, Gamification The success behind many games in the industry would surely be the best practices in gamification. Gamification involves everything which makes the game more competitive and drives more adrenaline to hit top positions in the leaderboard. Making a leaderboard for a game is not that easy because there is a good of many components such as database security, userAuth so on … Implementation Here we are going to implement a leaderboard using and for a simple game on unity3D. Here is the plan: PHP MySQL Write scripts to do queries on to our database PHP SQL Write scripts to send and access data between our application and the backend server. Here our application will be the game so we are going to use their own documentation to implement it. C# Unity3D Finally dumping our database on to a cloud, though we test it on localhost during development 😃. What we will implement We will make this as simple as possible so that we can have a better learning experience. We have a game where we have to store and in the database. So whenever the game ends we are going to store those data in the database and then retrieve the whole data which will be sorted and displayed on the leaderboard. Isn’t that simple. Let’s implement it now 😃. username score Writing PHP scripts You need to have some back-end scripting idea😉. We will be writing two files. PHP For and data _data.php_ sending retrieving For the score of the player whenever he makes a local high score. update.php updating : data.php we are going to declare a few essential variables to use in our code. $servername = "host_name";$dbname = "dabase_name";$username = "username";$password = "database_password";$playername = $_POST["playernamePost"];$score = $_POST["scorePost"]; this variable is used to store the username which is sent from our game application. this is a particular action which says that it is going to get the data stored in the variable which is sent by some unknown source. Though this isn’t that secure, we will just look into the basic implementation. The same goes with the variable too. $playername $_POST["playernamePost"] playernamePost $score Next, connecting the database $db = mysqli_connect($servername, $username,$password, $dbname); once the connection is successful we can go further using the queries to our data. SQL $sql = " SELECT * FROM data ORDER BY score";$push = "INSERT INTO data ( name, score) VALUES ('".$playername."','".$score."')"; this variable stores the query (data retrieval) in the form of a string. this variable stores the query _(_data pushing to the database) in form of a string again. You need to have some idea about the SQL query statements like what does , and so on… do to the data. They are very simple to understand though 😜. and are the columns of our database table. is the table name. this is used to sort our data without much hassle to write separate sorting algorithms for our data. I suggest you to avoid using it as it not that efficient. $sql SQL $push SQL SELECT INSERT name score data ORDER BY Making these queries work $retrieval = mysqli_query($db, $sql);$pushdata = mysqli_query($db,$push); Sending the variables as arguments to function will complete our job. mysqli_query You might think how our game application is going to get the data. That’s simple we print all the data as a single string on to our file. Later we will retrieve that data as a single string and do some string handling stuff to put it in our LeaderBoard. PHP while ($row = mysqli_fetch_assoc($retrieval)){echo";".$row['name'].":".$row['score']."";} We are going to fetch data using into a single variable and then use a while loop to print the complete data. We are done with mysqli_fetch_assoc($retrieval) $row data.php Now we can retrieve and push data using file. Now when you have to update the player’s score when he hits a high score, then you have to use this script. This would be quite similar to you simply use an update query. data.php update.php data.php update.php $servername = "host_name";$dbname = "database_name";$username = "username";$password = "password"; $playername = $_POST["playernamePos"];$score =$_POST["scorePos"];$db = mysqli_connect($servername, $username,$password, $dbname);$update = "UPDATE data SET score='$score' WHERE name='$playername'";$result = mysqli_query($db,$update); You find the particular column with the help of username and then you update the corresponding high score. We are done with writing files. Now let’s write scripts to connect the application and the back-end. PHP C# Writing C# scripts in Unity3D You need to be comfortable with documentation 😜. unity3D retrieval.cs public string url = "www.somecloudstorage.com/data.php";IEnumerator Start (){WWW retrieve = new WWW(url);yield return retrieve;string fulldata = retrieve.text;users = fulldata.Split(';');int n =0;list.text = "";for (int i = users.Length-1; i>=0; i--){n++;if (users[i] != "->0" && !(users[i].StartsWith("<"))){items = users[i].Split(':');list.text = list.text+ "\n"+n+". "+ items[0];list2.text = list2.text + "\n" + items[1];}}} is very useful here, as we want the program execution to pause until our whole data is loaded from the file. We do an request to that particular We do this by creating a object and sending the required Then we will wait until the data is loaded completely. We can access the data as a single string using Rest is quite easy, where we do some string handling stuff to retrieve it in the desired form. IEnumarator PHP HTTP PHP file. WWW URL. retrieve.text (check out Unity3D documentation when needed). We were able to retrieve data which was a cake walk, right!! Now let’s check out how we are going to push data to the database from our game application. push_highscore.cs public string url = "www.somecloudstorage.com/data.php";public void pushData(string username, int highscore){WWWForm form = new WWWForm ();form.AddField("playernamePos",username); form.AddField("scorePos",highscore);WWW push_Data = new WWW(url,form);} This few lines of code would complete our job. ⭐️ Remember that we are using Unit3D official documentation to implement this so you have to import the necessary packages. PHP Almost everything is done!! But I won't talk about how you will be updating the score. Have fun implementing it by yourself and I am sure you will be able to 😜. Dumping your data into a cloud space is obviously essential. You may find many cloud space providers in the market and dump your back-end code ( files), the database file (.sql file) and properly configure your PHPMyAdmin too. That’s it you are done!! 🎉 PHP Conclusion That’s it this is the basic way to implement a and code your own back-end for your game application using and 👋. leaderboard PHP MySQL 🌟 🌟 Remember that this is not at all a secure way of implementing a leaderboard for a game application(production). This is just to make you get up and start. You can catch me on @mehant1(Twitter) and 😃. https://github.com/kmehant
