Player API

Contents

• Problem Statement
• Assumptions
• API
  • HTTP Endpoints
• Development
• Provisioning and Deployment
• Tests
• Database Schema
• TODO

Problem Statement

Design a service that allows a developer to create, update, and modify user records. User records must include at least the following information:

• Personal Details: Personal details would consist of information that would be tied directly to a user. This should take into account information such as a player’s username and email.
• Game Statistics: This would be non-personal information about a player, based on their gameplay. Examples would include kills, deaths, wins, losses, etc.
• Achievements: Awards that a player earns after meeting a pre-determined criteria created by the game developer. e.g. win 5 matches
• Matches: Gameplay sessions that occur between 2 or more players. Examples of a * Match could be anything from two players competing a full game of chess, or 16 players competing in a team-based shooter.

Your response should include:

• A document detailing your interpretation of the prompt and assumptions that you have made
• (Pseudo) Code detailing the API you would expose and data models you would use. Any technology(s) can be used here.
• Partial implementations (CLI, REST API, test suites, etc). A major part of our assessment is a review of your actual written code, so it is important to show us a good portion of your application implemented.
• Any other information work you'd like to share.

Previous submissions have additionally included (all optional):

• Database Schemas
• Recommended Tech Stack
• Possible deployment architecture

Assumptions

• Game developers are responsible for updating player achievements. Although game stats can be tracked in Player API, a player must be given an achievement via a request from the game developer. It will NOT be triggered by a minimum stat count. It will not correlate to game stats at all.
• The same stat can be attributed to multiple players per match (e.g. multiple winners in a single match)
• Game developers can come up with their own kinds of stats that are relevant to their own games

API

Player API is REST API. It can accept a variety of requests from game developers to update player information relating to their games.

Player API accepts HTTP requests, with request parameters in the request body as JSON, and returns JSON in the response. Below are the API endpoints and the respective parameters they accept. Endpoints that have yet to be implemented are starred (***).

An example request looks like:

curl -H "Accept: application/json" -H "Content-Type: application/json" -X POST -d '{"screen_name": "Gamer600", "email":"[email protected]", "full_name": "Johnson Doe"}' http://localhost:3000/players 

HTTP Endpoints

---

POST /players

Creates a player

Parameter	Type	Description	Optional
screen_name	string	player's online pseudonym	no
email	string	player's email	no
full_name	string	player's name	no

PUT /players/:id

Updates certain attributes of a player

Parameter	Type	Description	Optional
email	string	player's email	yes
full_name	string	player's name	yes

POST /matches

Creates a match

Parameter	Type	Description	Optional
game	integer or string	id or name of game that match is associated with	no

PUT /matches/:id

Updates certain attributes of a match

Parameter	Type	Description	Optional
started	string	match start time -- parseable datetime string (e.g. '2015-03-25T12:00:00Z' or '5/13/1991')	yes
ended	string	match end time -- parseable datetime string	yes

PUT /matches/:id/players

Updates the players that took part in a match.

Parameter	Type	Description	Optional
player_ids	array (of ids)	list of players who participated in a match	yes (if not specified, participants are updated to none)

POST /achievements ***

Creates an achievement that is associated with a game

Parameter	Type	Description	Optional
description	string	A description of the achievement a player can receive	no
game	integer or string	id or name of the game that achievement is associated with	no

PUT /achievements/:id ***

Updates an achievement that is associated with a game

Parameter	Type	Description	Optional
description	string	A description of the achievement a player can receive	yes
game	integer or string	id or name of the game that achievement is associated with	yes

POST /achievements/:id/players/:id ***

Gives the player an achievement, if they have already received that achievement, it increases their count by one. This request only needs an achievement id and a player id to specified in the url.

POST /stat_types ***

Add a new stat type that can be tallied. Game developers can add new ones because their could be statistics specific to their game.

Parameter	Type	Description	Optional
description	string	A description of the new stat (e.g. 'Win', 'Loss').	no

POST /stats ***

Attribute game stats to players and matches. This API request is made after a match when all the stats have been tallied.

Parameter	Type	Description	Optional
stat_type	integer or string	id or name of the statistic type	no
match_id	integer	id of the match the stat was achieved during	no
player_id	integer	id of the player the stat was achieved by	no
quantity	integer	the count of the stat (e.g. 15 kills in the match). 0 if not specified	yes

Development

Player API is a Node.js running application interface with a MySQL database backend. It was designed with the Express web application framework and has been designed to run on a Linux Operating System. To date, it has successfully been run and tested on a Debian-based OS (Linux Mint).

Requirements

To develop locally, you will need to install a few dependencies:

1. Install Node.js

#  Install NVM
wget -qO- https://raw.githubusercontent.com/creationix/nvm/v0.33.4/install.sh | bash

# Install Node 6.11 with npm
nvm install 6.11

2. Install Yarn

npm install -g [email protected]

3. Setup MySQL

sudo apt-get install mysql-server

Once you have installed MySQL, create the player_api database and run the SQL scripts found in ansible/files/database/ to create and populate tables.

4. Install Ansible

sudo pip install ansible==2.2.0.0

Ansible is a provisioning and deployment tool that can be used to codify configurations need to run applications.

5. Setup configuration file You will also need to set up your configuration file that lives in config/application.json (this will depend on the MySQL instance you are connecting too)

{
  "database": {
    "host": "localhost",
    "port": 3306,
    "database": "player_api",
    "username": "player_api",
    "password": "player_api"
  }
}

Once the above has been set up, you can run the application with:

yarn install

npm start

Tools

I recommend using MySQL Workbench to view database changes and Postman to test out API requests.

Provisioning and Deployment

To provision a dev environment, you can use the Vagrantfile provided. Note, vagrant (and virtualbox) may be needed to run the application. Simply run:

cd ansible && ansible-galaxy install -r requirements.yml

cd .. && vagrant up

The vagrant instance runs on an Ubuntu image. You can use the same ansible scripts used to provision the dev environment to deploy a staging or production environment. Simply add a new inventory file in the ansible/inventories directory and add the new environment-specific variables in the ansible/inventories/group_vars directory.

I also plan to create a deployment script (see TODO) that can be incorporated into the Vagrantfile.

Tests

To run the unit tests.

npm test

The unit tests do not require connectivity to a test database, as all database interactions are stubbed. However, you must have config/application.json present to run the tests. Going forward, these tests can be integrated into CI pipelines to ensure that every deployed application passes all tests.

Database Schema

TODO

• Design and implement 'read' routes. The problem only stated to make a service that would 'create, update and modify' player data, so that took priority. Ideally, game developers would want to look up player data for their own use.
• Implement the remaining HTTP Endpoints:
  • POST /achievements
  • PUT /achievements/:id
  • POST /achievements/:id/players/:id
  • POST /stat_types
  • POST /stats
• Implement token based authentication, so only game developers have access to the API (this is especially important since the API could be exposed publically)
• Implement application deploy script. An example implementation of this could involve:
  • Bundling the application with it dependencies into a tarball
  • Copying the tarball to the target server(s)
  • Unpacking and starting the application process
  • Setting up a reverse-proxy that can serve the application process to an outgoing port like 80 or 443)
• Implement Continuous Integration which runs unit tests and deploys application changes
• Create Unit Tests for the API routes
• Refactor/DRY up test code
• Setup logging (both incoming requests and errors)
• If stat aggregation was a desired feature, I would recommend that the API would stream messages (via a platform like Kafka) of player-stat data to a search index (like ElasticSearch). This would allow more quickly obtained data views