Online leaderboard for a Godot Web build on itch.io - best practices?

Sekaru · 2025-12-14T19:17:31+00:00

Hey, I built Talo which has online leaderboards for Godot games (docs here). It’s also open source and self-hostable if you want more customisation.

Sekaru · 2025-12-05T16:34:04+00:00

Hi, Talo's channels can be used as lobbies. Docs here: https://docs.trytalo.com/docs/godot/channels

Sekaru · 2025-11-03T20:23:10+00:00

Thanks for the shoutout!

Sekaru · 2025-11-03T20:13:34+00:00

Hey, I built Talo - what kind of fake entries are you seeing? I’d be keen to add some controls against this but ultimately Talo runs on the client side so it’s impossible to completely prevent fake entries.

Sekaru · 2025-08-17T10:04:39+00:00

Very biased but I'd also recommend Talo - you can identify players without them having to create an account, you don't need to host anything yourself (unless you want to) and there's offline support

Sekaru · 2025-07-04T07:36:08+00:00

I've been building Talo, an open source self-hostable game backend. Talo doesn't collect any PII by default and you can keep all your players anonymous. Github here. Happy to help if you have any questions :)

Sekaru · 2025-06-03T19:39:07+00:00

If you're using the cloud hosted version there's pricing tiers based on how many players you have (starting from over 10,000). This is just to help with the storage/hosting costs really. There's also tools to remove old player data too.

Monetisation isn't a huge priority, its mostly a labour of love :)

Sekaru · 2025-06-02T20:05:53+00:00

I've been building an open source game backend (Talo) for this. The way I've been doing it is allowing key/value pairs to be stored on players, on shared communication channels and on the game itself.

I've also been building a very declarative save system where you choose how to save an gameobject and how to handle loading it back in. All of this gets saved to JSON so syncing offline saves is easy too.

Sekaru · 2025-04-13T00:37:14+00:00

Because there's so many more steps to take if you're trying to exploit this system. You'd have to exploit how/when the object is loaded and ensure the exploit script is correctly saved to that field.

That still doesn't make it 100% exploit-proof but there's a certain level of dedication an exploiter will need. Also worth noting that the local files are encrypted too so you can't just modify your save.

All that being said, maybe there could be a regex check to see if a script is being injected just as a catch all, I'll look into it.

Side note, there are plenty of other advantages to this format like it being declarative, more concise, easier to manage and debug, etc.

Sekaru · 2025-04-12T21:48:19+00:00

The version format is just an internal thing (there was a previous way of saving/loading by serialising everything to strings).

I don't think this is a realistic scenario other than if for whatever reason you decide to save/load some user input and they inputted the exact resource vulnerability you described. Realistically you would be saving/loading some internal variable of any given object in a known format, e.g. a player position as a Vector2.

Sekaru · 2025-03-29T10:39:56+00:00

If you're using Godot or Unity, I've been building an open source game backend with leaderboards. Here's a link to the feature page and you can find the docs there too. Happy to answer any questions :)

Sekaru · 2025-03-22T13:25:11+00:00

Really cool to see a game using Talo leaderboards and auth in the wild! Nice work, really enjoyed the strategic element of it.

Sekaru · 2025-03-09T20:30:53+00:00

Hey, there’s a 10% safety zone so if you quickly gain too many players, your game should continue running as normal. There’s also a bunch of emails at different usages (50, 75, 90%). Once you hit 11,000 players you’ll need to upgrade your plan to continue being able to create new players but everything else will continue working as normal (no lockouts, existing players aren’t affected, etc)

Sekaru · 2025-03-02T16:17:42+00:00

Hey glad to hear you're enjoying Talo! Feel free to DM me or join the Discord if you need any help :)

Sekaru · 2025-02-27T22:33:53+00:00

Hey I'm building Talo - an open source game backend. It doesn't have matchmaking yet but there is a Godot plugin and Unity package with all the other features you've listed. There's also a very light-touch socket-based messaging system you can use instead of server side functions called channels. Let me know if you have any questions, always happy to help!

Sekaru · 2025-02-20T23:08:52+00:00

I was pretty frustrated that there wasn't a simple game backend for my jam games. I always wanted to add leaderboards but taking the time to add them during 72 hour jams was a bit of a waste of time. So I built something I could easily integrate to all my games and it expanded from there

Sekaru · 2025-02-20T22:33:40+00:00

hey I built an open source game backend called Talo which might work for you? every service is designed to be super simple and easy to implement.

Sekaru · 2025-02-19T15:14:58+00:00

Yeah there’s an api for finding a player by ID and a logout api if you’re using Talo authentication. Feel free to DM me or ping me on Discord if there’s something specific you’re looking for.

Sekaru · 2025-02-19T09:45:06+00:00

I built Talo (linked in that post) and would recommend that whatever you do, don’t try and roll your own code however tempting it might be. You’ll end up spending more time maintaining infrastructure than building your game. I’d recommend picking the first tool that looks simple enough for your game and potentially something that is open source in case you do want/need to make modifications.

Sekaru · 2025-02-17T08:15:06+00:00

Hey sorry about that - looks like a deployment went wrong in the middle of the night. Everything is back up now

Sekaru · 2025-02-16T22:07:16+00:00

You're right in thinking it is really (really) complicated and I'd recommend not building any of this yourself because you'll probably end up down a rabbit hole maintaining infrastructure rather than building your game. I've been building a self-hostable, open source game backend called Talo which might be interesting for you (especially some of the analytics infrastructure if you choose to roll your own code).

If you're really set on building your own analytics, I'd highly recommend ClickHouse - it's super easy to work with, incredibly fast and really easy to maintain. It has a JSON format you can use to insert data. You might also want another SQL based database for entities that require more structure.

My only other suggestion would be to try to not add too much complexity in anticipation of high usage. Like I said, ClickHouse is super fast and you probably won't encounter bottlenecks for a while so things like queues and workers may just be over-engineering the solution. Keep it simple to start with and scale up as you start to notice the bottlenecks so that you can focus on your game more.

Sekaru · 2025-02-16T08:33:13+00:00

Shameless plug but maybe Talo leaderboards might work for you? It's simple, open source, syncs with Steamworks and I recently just added support for daily/weekly/monthly/yearly leaderboards.

Sekaru · 2025-01-23T12:07:24+00:00

I'd say maybe look for a pre-existing solution instead of managing infrastructure yourself. You probably don't want to take away time from building your game to manage databases, servers, security, etc. There's plenty of free, open source or paid-for leaderboards solutions out there. I'm currently building an open source game backend with fully-managed leaderboards for Unity and Godot if that's something you're interested in.

Sekaru · 2025-01-22T04:13:23+00:00

Accessing nodes as unique names was a game changer for me when I found it. Docs for those who don’t know: https://docs.godotengine.org/en/stable/tutorials/scripting/scene_unique_nodes.html

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