Scoreloop, Leaderboards & Marmalade

Well you know i am using the Marmalade SDK for my current game 'Hot chicks the Card Game'. This is still my simplist game and my current development title. As i am Still waiting on Apple to approve me as an iOS developer i am unable to work cross platform, bah! So instead i am working on several game designs and looking around for important stuff to work on.

As it happens I have been eyeing Leaderboards. I needs them, Heck i WANT them soo badly as all the games I write will be enhanced by having them. Now a while back I was loking at ScoreLoop. I liked what it says on their Web site and when I saw they had produced an SDK version that fits into Marmalade as a module my interest was absolutely piqued.

So I started on Saturday Evening by browsing on my Kindle Fire for a Scoreloop enabled game. I found a couple that looked like i might want to play them and downloaded them. Seconds later i was playing one of the games, though playing was not my priority. So I had a look around the menu system. Now i EXPECTED to have to Sign up for Scoreloop. I expected that I would probably not be able to see any high scores until I did this. Well I was wrong, gladly so...

In Fact it was amazing. I did not have to sign up for Scoreloop due to it's design and nature. It already knew who I was (the UID of my device makes Me unique). Once Scoreloop gets contacted by a machine it does not already know, they assign me a Handle or username (mine was Player_93235684, or something close to that). Then that is who I am on this machine. So without ANY sign up, i am in a score table, i can view other peoples scores from around the world (or other search options).

One thing putting m off was that I expected I needed to ask everyone to participate by signing up for some leaderboard or achievement system they have never heard of before. This is NOT so with Scoreloop. Now after i saw how wonderful this was I decided to play around a bit. So by touching my name i this one game I was given the option to change my User Handle or name. Excellent, i of course changed it to 'Da Voodoochief'. Later I went onto the other game and saw that it Already knew of my new User Name, YAY!

I was So excited in this amazingly forsighted way of handling new players that i spent most of Sunday working on inegrating Scoreloop into Hot Chicks. Here is a picture from Sunday evenings work in progress.

As you can see I have my test name information and also the top 10 in the leaderboard. Very exciting stuff. Now i will do another post about that real soon. Too much for continuing this post after all :)

Good luck,
Da Voodoochief