The Leaderboard Update

While I'm hopeful for catalog access, and the Scoreboard API it allows, Squids is the type of game that demands a leaderboard. And so, being impatient, I made one

Freshly launched and cleared of my test data, the Squidboards are open and waiting for some friendly competition!

How It Works

While some amazing avenues, like PD Portal, have been opening up, the playdate still doesn't (and might never?) have a developer accessible way to access the net. While this is a personal pain-in-the-neck, it's a good thing, as it keeps us all clear and free from ads, microtransactions, and data collection. So how do we get information from the game to a website? 

The tried and true method of course: A QR Code! 

I learned a lot about QR Code Density during this update. Mainly, I had originally built the 'board out to support daily and weekly times, but once I had switched from the web side over  to the deck side, I quickly realized that as you pack more and more data into a QR Code it becomes both harder for phones to read, and more prone to weird bits of data rot. Like, a JSON parser doesn't appreciate a random "7" being added to it.

Anyways, it was quite bad. And so, I set about reducing the string length to something more reasonable, which meant that even though I had built support out for it, both in game and on the site, sending a whole block of daily and weekly scores was out of the cards.

But, there's a bit of a silver lining

Just because it's not reasonable to sync all that data over a QR code, doesn't mean it's not useful: Squids now supports local Score visibility, so you can ignore that one amazing run you did, and just try to get a high daily score. It's a nice little way to get a bit of dopamine when you've already hit your heights.

Other things

• Added a wrapping paper for folks' initial download. It's terrible and I love it
• Fixed the icon. Now it's a lovely little bubble
• Minor bug fixes and some so-small-you-likely-won't-notice-them changes to some of the bounding areas

I'll probably write a separate, more in depth thing about building the leaderboards (the pain, the triumph, the confoundment), but I think this one works well short and sweet.

See you on the Squidboards!