With the game coming to Steam, I spent the day making a leaderboard. Steam does make it easy to add leaderboard and you can add any kind of leaderboard you can think of. For Balloon Popping Pigs, I went with a high score and daily high score. In the future there might be leader boards for each pig, but at the moment, I would rather keep it simple.

Google Play Services made it easy to have leaderboards as everything was external. All I needed to do was have the button available and it would open up to the services. By default it had daily, weekly and overall leaderboards. The only problem is that Google Play Services wanted to know your friends in your address book for leaderboard purposes and to a lot of people that was just a red flag in general and probably hurt the game’s install rate. People would tell me that it looked strange that the little game would ask for so many permissions.

The challenge to the Steam leaderboard was having it all inclusive in the game, rather than external like the Android version of the game. Since Balloon Popping Pigs is a game that can be played with a mouse, touch screen, keyboard or controller, several new buttons had to be working. There is already a default button system in the game that lets you click, press or scroll through, but everything in the in game leaderboard was custom made apart from what had already been standardized.

It was a smooth process compared to AquaNimble‘s extensive leaderboard and high score system. There is an extensive high score system kept in Balloon Popping Pigs, but its underutilized and boiled down to a straight forward number at the start of each game that appears in the background.

The price range of the game should make watching the leaderboards interesting. If the game picks up, I will make leaderboards for specific pigs.

UPDATE

Having so little for a leaderboard seemed dull, and I kept thinking will people play this on a daily basis? Judging from AquaNimble, the answer is no, so I added weekly and monthly. Its easy to add the leaderboard function, just a bit of a process to dig out the user interface. If Balloon Popping Pigs were to catch on I can make good use of weekly and monthly leader boards.

As you can see from the image, the font is larger and more visible now as well.

UPDATE AGAIN

You can also view the next and previous 10 players in a list now that the list has gone past 10 players. That’s probably all for the leaderboard for a while now.