Leaderboards and Achievements

In the past two weeks we have experimented with online leaderboards for the Android version of our casual game. Giving players the chance to see the scores of other people (and their friends), instantly makes a casual game a lot more competitive and fun. Online leaderboards were also a request from multiple test users during our evaluations. In this blog post we will go over the challenges we encountered and the results we now have in our casual game.

Research

It was already decided during the first brainstorm session, that leaderboards and achievements were

something we really wanted in our game. That's why we started researching our possibilities early on too. The most popular library we encountered was the Google Play Game Services library. However this required a Google Developer account and although it was possible to use the account of the KU-Leuven HCI department, we decided to look for a free alternative first. 

Swarm

The free alternative we found was Swarm. This library was very easy to integrate into our game, after 20 minutes it was already up and running. At first everything seemed to work just fine. However, it soon became clear that there were some problems with this library, that started to bother us (and some of our testers). We've searched for a way to fix them, but ultimately decided to move on to another leaderboard library. 

The main reasons we chose to drop Swarm were:

• Players didn't stay logged in consistently. Every time the game was booted up, there was a small chance that players had to manually log in again.
• Sometimes the leaderboard just refused to go online, even when players were connected to the internet.
• The leaderboard screen could only be shown in portrait mode (vertical), while the rest of the game is in landscape mode (horizontal).
• Players that beat their highscore while offline, had it overwritten with their previous highscore when they tried to go online.
• The popup notification whenever a player submits a score to Swarm, glitched on the phone of one of our testers. It remained visible even after our game had been shut down. This tester had to reboot his phone to make it go away.
• The look of the leaderboard didn't match the look of our game at all.

Swarm login screen	Swarm leaderboards	Swarm notification glitch

Google Play Game Services

While experimenting with Swarm, we released DinoTopHat on the Google Play Store through the Google Developer account of the KU-Leuven HCI department. Since now our game was already published on the Google Play Store, it required much less extra effort to get started with Google Play Game Services (GPGS) than before. This is why we decided to have a go at implementing our leaderboards with this library. We also discovered that if you want to use the GPGS  library, it was necessary to register at least five ingame achievements. Thus it was decided that we would make use of this opportunity and implement the achievements along with the leaderboard. Just like the Swarm leaderboards, implementing the GPGS leaderboard was pretty straightforward. We also added 9 achievements and are very pleased with the result. The leaderboard looks better and all other issues we had with Swarm also seem to be fixed.

GPGS login screen

GPGS leaderboards

GPGS achievements