While I am by no means a “veteran” in the game dev world I have been coding professionally and designing web applications for around 20 years now.
Anyone stumbling upon this; I would highly recommend checking out the use of SQL. I am not 100% sure on when/why/what makes it worth it… but I know I will need this eventually so my high scores for a time trial game are going in. It really probably makes sense for any Relational Data to go in SQL.
For me it’s about;
- Scale
- Sorting
- Complex query operations made simple
- (optionally) decoupling from the client
I am personally following this series, which looks well made and complete.