During the Wasting Space project one of my responsibilities was creating our leaderboard. It needed to be persistent across multiple plays of the game, it neded to be able to both show the Top X players and know what place the current player is in when they finish the game, and of course as an added bonus we wanted it to be globally persistent. To accomplish this, instead of going with simple solution using Firebase, or AWS, I learned how to use the Google Sheets API for C#. This API allowed me to add, remove, edit, and sort cells in a public or private spreadsheet on my Google Drive. Using this API along with the Google Cloud Platform, I was able to make a “service” account for Google Sheets which allowed our program to communicate with the document. While this was not a conventional or even efficient solution it opened my eyes to the possiblities that exist when using services not as intended.
