#100DaysOfCode in Python Transcripts
Chapter: Days 97-99: Building JSON APIs
Lecture: Introducing our online game server

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0:00 Welcome to Day 97.
0:02 Michael again here with you and we're going to bring
0:05 a bunch of things together that we've previously done
0:08 and what I think is actually a really cool way
0:11 of pushing and combining what you know.
0:14 So we're going to build an online game.
0:17 And it's going to be a multiplayer game,
0:19 not multi-interactive real time game,
0:22 but multiple players from multiple places
0:23 log in and play this game online
0:26 and you get things like high scores,
0:27 who's won the most games, active players, things like that.
0:31 And what's really cool is you basically
0:33 already know like 80% of what you need to do this.
0:37 The final bit we're going to put together here
0:39 with a little bit of APIs and Flask.
0:43 Online games are fun, right?
0:45 Here's a cool one, Eve Online.
0:47 This is actually powered by Python on the backend
0:50 in some really, really important ways
0:52 and it's this MMO, massively multiplayer online game.
0:57 And I actually interviewed the guys from Eve
0:59 over on Talk Python in Episode 52
1:01 if you want to learn about that.
1:02 That's all pretty interesting.
1:04 So we're going to build an online game.
1:06 Now, it's not as amazing as this, right?
1:08 This is incredibly cool, taking hundreds of people
1:10 working on it for a really long time.
1:12 But let's see what we have and how we can piece it together.
1:15 So over here, on Days 13, 14, and 15,
1:19 we talked about text games.
1:21 And the thing we actually built
1:22 was a Dungeons & Dragons wizard game.
1:24 Remember that?
1:25 It was a long time ago, I know,
1:27 but that was one of the first things we built.
1:28 It was really fun, we learned about classes and so on.
1:31 We also discussed this 15-way Rock Paper Scissors.
1:36 And we've come back to this 15-way Rock Paper Scissors
1:39 several times so we're going to do that again today
1:42 for the thing we're going to build together.
1:44 You don't necessarily have to build that one.
1:46 Actually you probably won't build that one yourself
1:48 but that's the one we're going to build together.
1:50 What else do we have?
1:51 Well, we saw that we can consume structured APIs
1:55 with Uplink, recall this?
1:56 We actually went to our movie search service
1:59 and created this Uplink client
2:00 to communicate with that and we're going to again
2:02 use Uplink to build the client side,
2:06 the playing the game side, the user side of this app.
2:09 Not the service side but consuming the service side
2:11 stuff that we build.
2:12 So Uplink's coming back, that'll be fun.
2:14 On Day 76, Julian told us all about Flask
2:17 and how simple and easy it is to get started.
2:19 We're going to take our Flask knowledge
2:22 and use Flask as the web framework for hosting
2:25 our application that is our game server.
2:28 It has the various operations that we need to use
2:31 in order to make our client applications run.
2:35 Finally and really, really importantly, we have databases.
2:40 In order to scale out our server,
2:43 make it survive reboots and all sorts of stuff,
2:45 we need to save our data and have data integrity
2:49 across the various requests and executions
2:53 of our web server.
2:54 So we're going to use SQLAlchemy.
2:56 In fact we're going to use already the exact same model
2:58 that we already added here.
3:00 So over in our demo recall we built
3:02 our persistent Rock Paper Scissors.
3:04 So we're going to take our persistent Rock Paper Scissors
3:07 and convert it to a server side version
3:10 and use the database to keep that information
3:13 going back and forth and then we're going to write
3:14 a little client to use it, that way everybody
3:17 plays on the same server, we have all the shared data
3:19 about who's played what, what were the history high scores,
3:23 things like that.
3:24 I hope you see that we have all the pieces
3:26 with the exception of building just the API methods
3:30 which turn out to be pretty simple in Flask
3:31 if you're not trying to do too much.
3:33 It's going to be an ambitious 3 days
3:36 but we can do it and it's going to be super rewarding.
3:39 So let's get started.