A Space Invaders in ECS Express Mode with server-side anti-cheat
Dejé un juego de Space Invaders corriendo en AWS y lo que más me costó no fue el juego. Fue que un líder de ranking con el servidor confiando en el score que manda el cliente se llena de tramposos en cinco minutos. Así que terminé construyendo un backend que recibe eventos de kills, no puntajes, y un anti-cheat de 8 reglas que recalcula el score del lado del servidor. Y después descubrí que, para…
A developer ran a game of Space Invaders on AWS and found that a ranking leaderboard was easily exploitable by cheaters. To address this, they built a backend that receives kill events, not scores, and an anti-cheat system with 8 rules that recalculates the score on the server-side. The developer used ECS Express Mode to deploy the service, which reduced the need to write 30 Terraform resources.
The anti-cheat system uses a pure function to validate score submissions and includes physical limits to prevent cheating, such as minimum playtime and kill rate limits. The system also uses a DynamoDB table to store scores and Prometheus exposition format for observability.
Written by urgent.news from Dev.to's report — not a translation of it. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
