RankForge

Drop a production-ready leaderboard into any game in minutes. One API call to submit scores, real-time rankings via SSE, backed by AWS DynamoDB on Vercel.

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RankForge 🏆

Hackathon: H0 Hackathon — Track 3: Million-Scale Global App

Live Demo: rankforge-chi.vercel.app

Repo: github.com/kyisaiah47/rankforge

Inspiration

Every multiplayer game needs a leaderboard. But building one that's actually production-ready — handles millions of concurrent players, updates in real time, and works across any game — is a serious infrastructure problem most indie devs and small studios don't have time to solve.

I wanted to build the thing I wish existed: a dead-simple leaderboard API you drop into any game in minutes, backed by infrastructure that scales without you touching it.

What It Does

Register a game, get an API key, submit scores. That's the entire integration surface.

  • Score Submission — one POST call from any language, any platform
  • Real-Time Leaderboard — rankings update live via Server-Sent Events, no polling, no refresh
  • Time-Window Rankings — all-time, daily, weekly, and monthly boards out of the box
  • Multi-Game Dashboard — manage all your games and API keys in one place
  • Player History — per-player rank tracking across any time window

How I Built It

Architecture

Next.js 16 Frontend (Vercel) │ Server-Sent Events ▼ Vercel Serverless Functions (API layer) │ ▼ AWS DynamoDB (score storage + ranking) ├── scores — partitioned by gameId + period ├── games — metadata + API keys └── players — per-player best scores

Score writes go directly to DynamoDB. The SSE stream endpoint polls DynamoDB every 5 seconds and pushes ranked results to all connected clients. When a new score lands, the leaderboard re-ranks and flashes the updated row live — no websockets, no pub/sub infrastructure needed.

Tech Stack

Layer Technology
Database AWS DynamoDB
Frontend Next.js 16, Tailwind CSS, shadcn/ui
API Next.js Route Handlers (Vercel Serverless)
Streaming Server-Sent Events (SSE)
Hosting Vercel
Auth API key per game (hashed, stored in DynamoDB)

DynamoDB Integration

DynamoDB is the entire data layer — no secondary database, no cache layer needed:

  • scores table partitioned by gameId#period with score as the sort key — range queries for leaderboard reads are single-digit milliseconds
  • games table stores game metadata and hashed API keys for auth
  • players table tracks each player's all-time best per game for instant rank lookups
  • Write throughput scales horizontally with DynamoDB's on-demand capacity — no provisioning, no ceiling
  • TTL attributes on daily/weekly/monthly entries expire automatically — no cleanup jobs

The combination of partition key design and DynamoDB's native sort makes leaderboard queries $O(1)$ per period without any external ranking service.

Challenges

  • Real-time without websockets: Vercel's serverless functions don't support persistent connections. SSE with a 5-second poll interval gave the real-time feel within the constraints of the platform.
  • Time-window ranking: Keeping daily/weekly/monthly boards consistent under concurrent writes required careful partition key design — writes fan out to multiple period keys atomically.
  • API key auth at the edge: Hashing and validating API keys inside serverless functions with no shared session state meant every request is fully self-contained — fast but required tight key design.

What's Next

  • Webhooks — notify your backend when a player hits a new rank milestone
  • Embeddable widget — drop a live leaderboard iframe into any web page
  • Analytics dashboard — score distribution, player retention, peak activity windows
  • SDK packages for Unity, Unreal, and web

Team

Built solo by @kyisaiah47 for the H0 Hackathon, Track 3: Million-Scale Global App.

Built With

  • aws-dynamodb
  • next.js
  • server-sent
  • shadcn/ui
  • tailwind-css
  • typescript
  • vercel
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