When it comes to game development, or at least game development that has an online component to it, you’re going to stumble into the territory of user profile stores. These are essentially records for each of your players and these records contain everything from account information to what they’ve ...

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 bef...

When it comes to game development, an often forgotten component comes in the form of a database for storing gameplay information. The database can contribute to numerous roles, such as storing user profile information, game state, and so much more. In fact, I created a previous tutorial titled Creat...

If you’re building a game, you’re probably going to need audio such as sound effects and background music at some point in time. Without audio, the gameplay experience can feel quite boring, which no one wants their game to be labeled as. I’ve recently written quite a few tutorials on the topic of g...

Performance is everything when it comes to video games. Lag and stutter due to dropped frames can easily ruin your game. This means that you have to be considerate of how you manage your game resources to prevent unnecessary operations and stress on the client computer or mobile devices running the ...

When you create a game, you may find yourself needing to accept keyboard input from the user. I’m not talking about using the keyboard to control your player, but instead to accept text from the keyboard to be used as a username or for the in-game chat. If you’ve been keeping up with the Phaser cont...

When you’re building a game, you’re probably going to have more than one screen. For example, you might have an initial menu screen, a main gameplay screen, and a game over screen. These screens can be thought of as scenes in a game, the same way you can think of scenes in film. Every scene that you...

So you’re at a point in your game where you need to allow the player to interact with the game. While keyboard events are common in a lot of games, they aren’t the only way to interact, and they may not even be the best way to interact if you’re planning on taking your game into a mobile setting. An...

I recently wrote about handling collisions in a Phaser 3.x game. In this previous tutorial titled, Handle Collisions Between Sprites in Phaser with Arcade Physics, the focus was around the arcade physics engine that Phaser integrates with. While you should use the arcade physics engine whenever poss...

In 2D games, it is not uncommon to want animated backgrounds. Having static images in your levels doesn’t necessarily add to the game-play experience, so a little bit of motion can go a long way. So how can you do this without having to manage these background images like you would a typical sprite?...

When it comes to game development, a lot of games will require interaction between the player and the environment or the player and another player. For example, you’d probably want to prevent your player from falling through floors or make them lose health every time an opponent collides with them. ...

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 h...

You might recall that I recently wrote a tutorial titled Animate Spritesheets in a Phaser Game where I created two different sprite animations from a single spritesheet. The process was quite simple, but not very optimized. In this previous tutorial, the spritesheet had each frame being composed of ...

When it comes to MongoDB, an often overlooked industry that it works amazingly well in is gaming. It works great in gaming because of its performance, but more importantly its ability to store whatever complex data the game throws at it. Let’s say you wanted to create a drawing game like Pictionary....

When it comes to 2D game development, sprite animations are going to be a critical part of the game experience. No one wants to play a game with a static unappealing image that moves around on the screen. They are going to want vibrant animations that add a certain realism to the game-play experienc...

I’m pleased to announce that the course, Blogging with WordPress for Beginners, has been released to The Polyglot Developer courses portal. So what does this course attempt to accomplish? If you’re interested in starting a blog to represent your brand and grow your audience, you’ll see how to do thi...

I recently jumped on the hype train when it comes to streaming and picked up an Elgato Stream Deck. If you’re unfamiliar, these devices are essentially hotkey peripherals with LCD adjustable keys that allow you to quickly perform certain tasks. Could a keyboard shortcut get the job done? For a lot o...

If you’re interested in learning about COBOL, you’ll find a lot of value in, COBOL Development on the Mainframe, the latest episode of The Polyglot Developer Podcast. There’s been a lot of buzz around COBOL in recent news, which is amazing considering how far the programming technology dates back. I...

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 maintain...

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, d...

Building a website isn’t a difficult task in a lot of circumstances, but maintaining a website is a totally different story. When it comes to larger scale websites or blogs such as The Polyglot Developer, content can become out of date at any time, and it’s more likely to happen the longer the conte...

I’m pleased to announce that Live-Streaming on Twitch for Beginners, has been released to the courses portal on The Polyglot Developer website! After having seen the growing interest in the few Open Broadcaster Software (OBS) and Twitch tutorials that were released on the blog, it only made sense to...

I’m pleased to announce that the latest episode of The Polyglot Developer Podcast has been published! In Writing Tests in a Development Project, the topic is testing and it features repeat guest Corbin Crutchley, author and co-founder at Unicorn Utterances. Writing tests can often feel overwhelming,...

For a lot of organizations, when it comes to location, geofencing is often a very desirable or required feature. In case you’re unfamiliar, a geofence can be thought of as a virtual perimeter for a geographic area. Often, you’ll want to know when something enters or exits that geofence so that you c...

So you’ve decided that you want to start streaming content to Twitch, YouTube, or similar. When I say streaming, I mean live streaming, not publishing pre-recorded videos to be watched on-demand. Streaming is so popular that you might think it’s as easy as opening your web camera and clicking stream...

The latest episode of The Polyglot Developer Podcast, episode thirty-six featuring Upkar Lidder from IBM, can be found on all of the major podcast networks, including, but not limited to, Spotify and Apple Podcasts. In this episode titled, Machine Learning, AI, and Data Science, Upkar and myself exp...

I’m pleased to announce that the latest episode of The Polyglot Developer Podcast has been published to Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and pretty much every other major podcasting networking that exists. The topic of this episode, Developing on the Blockchain, is the blockchain, and I’m joined by expert L...

As a technical content streamer, one of the most difficult tasks for me to accomplish was with having guests participate on the stream. To be clear, I don’t mean having guests participate in the chat, I mean having them on the stream with their video, audio, and sometimes screen. Think about it. You...

MongoDB Stitch can do quite a few things, some of which include GraphQL, functions as a service, and triggers. However, another awesome feature is in its ability to host static HTML, JavaScript, and CSS, the core components to any static website. Static websites are becoming more popular due to thei...

As you’ve probably seen, I’ve been ramping up The Polyglot Developer on Twitch, when it comes to live streaming developer content. What might not be obvious to the viewer of the live streams is the technical effort that’s involved in making the stream possible. For example, how do you position all t...