What is way to go to implement leaderboards/achievements for solo developer?

It really feels like it should be easy to implement leaderboards/achievements on both android and ios. But from what I see it really is not. As I find out, for an indie developer it's better to rely on "Google play games" for Android and "Game center" for IOS, however I can't afford spending months implementing both separately and than dealing with troubles. Should I consider buying an asset e.g https://assetstore.unity.com/packag...ross-platform-native-plugins-ultra-pack-31086

 

what? I implemented google play's leaderboards + achievements in less than a day and i'm a "solo" developer... just youtube it

 

I didn't mean literally months, but that's good to know that it can be accomplished in a day. However few facts still concern me.
1)I'd need to do same for IOS, and than of course with any change I'd need to update two different codes.
2)What happens when I'll need to implement IAP, or "rate my app" or notifications. Than for every other thing you'll end up wasting too much time since you'd need to do everything twice.
Than again it might be start with implementing leaderboards + achievements on both IOS + android and spend some time on it. Than move to any asset or whatever if I'd need more features.

 

Just remember you only need to implement these features on the platforms you want a single time. For every additional game you can just copy and paste the solution you come up with. I can understand wanting to save time, but beyond keeping your solution up-to-date, which will happen as you make new games, you're only truly saving time for one game.

 

Yeah that's true. Actually I took a look once again, seems like Game center achievements/leaderboards is supported in unity by default, and it's quite easy to include also google play games support. And IAP seems to be easy to implement as well. So I think I'm going to do it without any asset, than we'll see

 

Any shared web hosting service that has an SQL database and a language like PHP would do. Lots of cheap ones out there probably cost about $5 a month or even less these days.

Then you can upload scores by called a URL like "http://mywebsite.com/playerid=123&score=666"
And get scores in a similar way.

Then write a bit of PHP to read or write the score to the database.

You can even use Google Cloud to host a free web-app but it's a bit more complicated for beginners I'd say.

If there is a service out there that hosts databases for free to hold leaderboards I don't know about it I'm afraid.

 

You'll want to abstract things away behind a proxy api. This way the rest of your game doesn't care what backend is being used, and you won't have to make changes twice since the only part that will be different per backend will be the actual upload/download

This is what I do for steam/gamejolt