Resolved Any Ideas how to make a leaderboard?

Hi!

I'm planning to implement a leaderboard into my game via SQL. But I'm concerned that it's possible to just decompile the code and create an SQL injection or something that could harm the server/security. I just wanted to know if this is possible and if yes what I could do to avoid this problem.

(Also I hope this is the right category)

Thanks!

 

Don't try and do all your engineering all-at-once. The above statement is many different steps.

Here are some of the steps, at least the first ones that come to mind:

- design what you want to store (score only? name? best time? Score and name and time and number of waves and reason for ultimate death?)

- design a data container to store that information

- design a manager to manage and sort a collection of such items

- decide how to present this to the user (only the first? scrollable? resettable?)

- decide how to accept new scores from the game

- decide how you might want to save the data to disk (SQL is probably the hardest possible way with the highest possible technical cost to implement and support, especially on multiple platforms... why not just use JSON?)

etc. etc etc

And as always, you are NEVER the first guy who wants to do this. Go straight to google and do perhaps a minimum of three (3) different leaderboard tutorials if you're unclear on anything above.

Tutorials and example code are great, but keep this in mind to maximize your success and minimize your frustration:

How to do tutorials properly, two (2) simple steps to success:

Tutorials are a GREAT idea. Tutorials should be used this way:

Step 1. Follow the tutorial and do every single step of the tutorial 100% precisely the way it is shown. Even the slightest deviation (even a single character!) generally ends in disaster. That's how software engineering works. Every step must be taken, every single letter must be spelled, capitalized, punctuated and spaced (or not spaced) properly, literally NOTHING can be omitted or skipped.

Fortunately this is the easiest part to get right: Be a robot. Don't make any mistakes.
BE PERFECT IN EVERYTHING YOU DO HERE!!

If you get any errors, learn how to read the error code and fix your error. Google is your friend here. Do NOT continue until you fix your error. Your error will probably be somewhere near the parenthesis numbers (line and character position) in the file. It is almost CERTAINLY your typo causing the error, so look again and fix it.

Step 2. Go back and work through every part of the tutorial again, and this time explain it to your doggie. See how I am doing that in my avatar picture? If you have no dog, explain it to your house plant. If you are unable to explain any part of it, STOP. DO NOT PROCEED. Now go learn how that part works. Read the documentation on the functions involved. Go back to the tutorial and try to figure out WHY they did that. This is the part that takes a LOT of time when you are new. It might take days or weeks to work through a single 5-minute tutorial. Stick with it. You will learn.

Step 2 is the part everybody seems to miss. Without Step 2 you are simply a code-typing monkey and outside of the specific tutorial you did, you will be completely lost. If you want to learn, you MUST do Step 2.

Of course, all this presupposes no errors in the tutorial. For certain tutorial makers (like Unity, Brackeys, Imphenzia, Sebastian Lague) this is usually the case. For some other less-well-known content creators, this is less true. Read the comments on the video: did anyone have issues like you did? If there's an error, you will NEVER be the first guy to find it.

Beyond that, Step 3, 4, 5 and 6 become easy because you already understand!

 

Hi! Thanks for the quick and detailed answer. I'm gonna look into checking out tutorials and gonna try to understand them. Also for the first part, I already have a plan how the Scoreboard and anything else should look like and how it should be stored. So yeah I'm gonna go and search for some videos/docs I can watch/read and gonna try it out.
And again, thanks for the detailed and nice answer!