Slick Forums

I have considered making a service like this in the past, not strictly for Slick but a more general service. Here are some problems that come to mind:

* How do you prevent people from entering fake scores?
* How do you decide what data can be tracked?
* What if I want to track 6 different fields, or 10, or 100?
* How do you ensure that one game doesn't accidentally write a score to a second?
* What is the value added for the game developer?
* What is the value added over other possible competitors?
* How does a game developer interact with the application? Is there a web interface?
* What policy is in place for the data? What if your servers go down? DB gets corrupted? You get tired of supporting the service?

Overall I think it's a neat idea and fairly straightforward. That said once you start talking about a web interface to manage your account, etc, then things get messy.

Also, some of the questions surrounding the maintenance and lifetime of the product are problematic. My immediate reaction is that the project may be better served if it starts off as an open source library in which different parties can pool their collective talent/knowledge. That way people would still get the benefit of reusing best ideas/practices but no one person would be responsible for owning and maintaining all of the data/service.

You could consider looking to something like for an example company which takes an open source project and provides a service on top of it. The service gains additional value as more people sign up to use it, i.e. a network effect. I think the biggest challenge for doing something similar with this idea is to determine how to make the experience become better as more users sign on.

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My website about game development

Hello, not sure where to put this but I found this post and it makes most sense to put it here I suppose.

Introducing:
Marks Free Highscore System



Information:
I have written a web interface and small library that interacts with my web server.

The service allows you to store highscores for games. It will also allow you to pull rank data out of the board as well. Example, you can get the top 100 ranks. You can also get "pages" of ranks. I.e. you specify how many ranks per page you want and what page you want and it will return the specified data. You can download the library and example code from the website (http://mark.st/highscores/)

What can it do for you?
At the moment it allows you to store highscores onto a server that is available 99.999% of the time. It cuts out on the need for you to have a server.

It also provides a very easy interface to get the score data into your game, rendering of the data is still up to you.

It not only stores the score! Along with the score, there are 5 extra text fields (max length 255 each) for you to store what ever you want! This could be player names, player country, level reached and other stats. It also gives you a unix timestamp of when the data was stored into the database.

When you insert a new score, it will return the rank of the score that had just been uploaded.

Using the service:
Register at the website. Once registered, login and create a new board. When the new board is created, you will be given an API key for that board. You can have as many boards per account that you want.

Using the library:
Example code is on the website, it is quite self explanatory. All you need to do is insert your API key into the code so the server knows where to store your highscores.

Limitations:
It will only return a maximum of 100 ranks at a time, this is to cut down on server cpu time. This may be increased in the future.

Also note that this is hosted on my personal server and if it proves popular enough, I will have to find an alternative hosting solution and so the library will need to be updated with a new URL.

Why have I made this?
I made this as I needed a highscore system for a game I am making at the moment and when I searched these very forums, I found this post and was up to the challenge! So here I am a few days later.

Feedback
Please give me feedback on anything please! If you want another method added into the library or or features etc, let me know. If there are bugs, they would be gratefully welcomed. Please email me at mark.satterthwaite@gmail.com

Thank you

Neat. I think Google App Engine is a perfect candidate for hosting a high score system.

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SingSong Karaoke - http://singthegame.com