WordPress for Unity Bridge: Timers Extension

Description

Once the WordPress plugin is installed on your website, all your current and future games are ready to implement uncheatable timers. You can either configure your timers in the inspector for 0 code setup or do so in 5 lines of code and you are done.

Simply give your timer a:

1. name ("Sample_name")
2. a duration (say 1 minute per point)
3. number of points to go through (sprout, grow, ready = 3 points)
4. where to start from (0)

...and your timer is ready. That easy. If the timer already exists then the value will be returned. If it doesn't exist it will be created and then returned with your initial values.

Time is tracked on the server so players can change their system date as much as they want without it affecting your game. In the case of the example timer above, it will return 1,2 or 3 after 1,2 or 3 minutes since being created or reset irrespective of what the actual date or time is thus making it impossible to cheat.

You have full control over the current and max values of each timer so you can even use it as a health system whereby players can be "upgraded" and receive and extra X number of max HP points and if they take damage you restore 1 HP every few minutes/seconds.

The possibilities are endless. Anything that uses a timer across game plays can benefit from uncheatable timers. You can even link up to events that trigger each time the value changes.

In my case, I like to write a local timer that updates itself every second and when it reaches 0 I contact the server again. the server always returns the correct number of seconds before the next point is reached so setting my local timer accordingly makes sure it never goes out of sync.

Technical details

1. Super simple to use: Can even configure timers in the inspector
2. Can be used for anything that uses a timer
3. Makes cheating impossible since timers are maintained server side
4. Timers are created by "number of seconds till done" not via time, meaning changing the local time on devices will not have any impact on how long the timers will take to count down
5. The server is polled as little as possible, thus keeping your bandwdth cost down. I.e. if you create a 60 second timer you only need to contact it every 60 seconds. When you do, the server will respond with an accurate amount of time left
6. Server side data is updated passively meaning no constant/wasted server side processing resulting in excessive costs
7. Since the timer returns how long it will take to complete the count down, you can display time as either a countdown or count up timer