3 services for online leaderboards in Godot

hey guys in this video i want to present to you three services to create online leaderboards for godot without further ado let's get started a lot of games comes with leaderboards nowadays but unlike in the arcade era they are now online implementing a local leaderboard in your game is pretty easy but it can get quite complicated when you need to make it available online you now need a server a database a secure connection between your game and the server and methods to add retrieve and organize the scores fortunately for you there are services out there that can make it easier for you today i'll present to you three services and compare their pros and cons with different approaches i'll talk about firebase nakama and silentwool let's start with firebase firebase is an online service made by google with the goal of providing useful features to developers it's available for mobile with native integrations but also for the web it has a complete rest api and there are multiple clients implementation for godot in gtscript usually distributed as add-ons firebase can do many things such as authentication database file storage machine learning and much more for the purpose of creating a leaderboard we are more interested with the database part creating an app and setting up a database is quite easy and because it's such a well-known service there are a lot of tutorials and documentation out there if you are a bit technical you should be able to use it without too much trouble it has a free tier which is called the spark plan it's a great starting point and unless your app is becoming a huge success you should be able to use only discipline so the pros of firebase are it's very powerful with a lot of services integrated it's a well-known provider google so it should be reliable it can scale very easily it's free with the sparc plan it has cloud hosting so you don't have to set up a server it has nice documentation and tutorials online and the integration is okay with godot through third-party libraries if we talk about the cons now it's made by google so some people won't like it there's no other way dying to use their cloud storage so you can't host your own servers and data it can be a bit cumbersome for a simple leaderboard now let's move on to the second service which is nakama you've probably heard about them it's a technology made by heroic labs which are sponsoring godot this is an open source project where you have to host your own server just like firebase it provides many features but really oriented towards games and server technologies there is a leaderboard feature and you have some nice documentation that comes with it nathan from gtquest made a nice tutorial and demo on how to use nakamas server unfortunately i don't think they made something specifically to create a leaderboard so the pros are it's a well-known provider in open source server technology it's free and open source it's self-hosted so you can control your data it has good official integration with godot in javascript using an add-on and it has nice documentations and tutorials all of that comes with some downsides of course there's no free cloud hosting and it start at 600 dollars per month and it's a bit cumbersome to spin your own server just for a leaderboard silentwolf is the last service i want to talk about it's a free back-end service made specifically for the godot engine it provides ways to create leaderboards authenticate players and host player data all for free i was a bit skeptical about this project when i first heard of it because i found it really surprising to have free hosting like that so i contacted the developer brass harpooner and he got back to me really quickly i won't go over all of our conversations but basically he can provide free hosting because he works as a cloud computing consultant so he must have access to some servers and if you're worried about security he has worked as a security consultant in the past he also told me that silent wolf client called will be published on github at some point that way people could contribute he plans on adding features to the service and having a paid tier in the future right now you can ask to have a backup of your data sent to you but you'll be able to do that from a dashboard in the future i would say the pros of this service are it's free to use it's very easy to use because it's made specifically for godot with simplicity in mind i created a leaderboard in just a few seconds once i was registered it has good and dedicated docs and tutorials for godot the cons are there is no self-hosting so you have less control over the data and of course it's more limited than firebase or nakama i presented to you three services that you can use right now to create your online leaderboard and obviously there are a lot of other options out there one route you can go is the custom one if you want full control and something completely suited for your needs you could make your own server and client using a database of your choice like mysql or mongodb or whatever a small server written in python javascript or even with godot and then the client in gd script communicating with the server using http request for example this is a solution that can be pretty fast if you know what you're doing i wouldn't recommend this solution if you're not familiar with this kind of development though one last word before i conclude if you're planning on releasing your game on mobile you can totally use the services we saw but you might want to look into the solution provided by google and apple respectively play game services and game kit these provide tight integration with the os and the google or apple account the user is using i think this one is the easiest way if you're developing for mobile okay so we saw three services that you can use to create your online leaderboards let me summarize real quick if you want full control over your data nakama is the solution for you it will require a bit of time investment to set up everything but you'll host your data yourself of course with this solution you can rent hosting online but you'll have to set up and manage the server in the case where you want someone to host your database for you you have the choice between firebase and silentwool if you need high reliability and scalability i would say go with firebase but if you don't like google though or you want a simpler solution silent wolf is the right fit for you for anyone making a small game or a game in a game jam i would go with silent wolf it's by far the easiest to use and even if one day you want to switch you can get your data as json and re-import them in a new database alright that's the end of the video i hope you liked it if you know or are using another service that you find good link it in the comments below of course you'll find all the links of what i talked about in the description below if you want to discuss the video see what i'm working on talk about game dev or just hangout join us on my discord server just scan this qr code or use the link in the description i'll see you in the next video in the meantime have a great day see you later bye

Channel: MrEliptik

Views: 1,543

Keywords: godot, godot-engine, godot engine, gamedev, games, development, game development, leaderboard, scores, score, services

Id: 1VObniEyA3Q

Length: 7min 11sec (431 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 01 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/Coffee4cr]

Thanks for this

[u/Real-Set3201]

Thanks, very useful!