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Greetings!
Ludum Dare 38 is getting closer every day. But first, let’s do another MiniLD!
Do you remember arcade games in dodgy cafes, dedicated amusement arcades or, as in my case, the local ferry? Games that were brutally hard and designed to eat your quarters, but they all had one thing in common: a high score leaderboard! Of course, getting your name on that leaderboard would be a sign of awesomeness.
What’s the theme?
For this MiniLD, I wanted to do something with high scores, so I’ve decided to call the theme “elympics” (sorry, but I can’t resist a bad pun). The aim is simply to make a game where you end up with a score that can be submitted to a leaderboard. What kind of score is up to you – the game could be a speedrun, a time-limited trial or simply a “collect the most points” type of challenge.
I have designed a simple API that your game may use to submit scores, and the idea is to show all the high scores of participating games on a single page. Of course, you can skip that part and just have a leaderboard internally in your game, but it would be fun if people would join in and submit scores to the API.
The theme is not meant to be restricting games to Olympic events, but if you want to use that as inspiration, go ahead! Remember that the Olympic games are ancient and that many events have disappeared since the ancient games started around 776 BC. Some examples are tug-of-war, firefighting and running while wearing armour.
When is the deadline?
This is February’s MiniLD, so you have until the end of the month. This post was published Friday 17th, so that’s around 11 days in total. For completeness, the deadline is Tuesday February 28th, 24:00 AoE (UTC-12).
Update: I’ll leave the submission open until there’s a new MiniLD/as long as possible 
Are there prizes?
Nope – except fame and improving your gamedev skills!
What do I do?
Make a game, any game! If you want to submit high scores and have your leaderboard on the official page, go to https://dollarone.games/elympics/ to register your game and to find details about the API where you can submit scores.
All the leaderboards from games that utilize the high score API will be displayed at https://dollarone.games/elympics/leaderboards.html.
Good luck and have fun!
Interesting. I am in. But there is no password for leaderboard ?
awesome! if you go to https://dollarone.games/elympics/ you can get an API key by filling in the form! Just follow the instructions on that site to submit scores.
So if we got “OK” back from the /submitHighscore url, that should mean our leaderboard should work after the deadline passes?
so the idea was that your game should submit all scores to the /submitHighscore url, and then you’ll be able to see the highscores on the leaderboard page. I will add a separate API to getHighscores so you can display them in your own game
Yeah that would be awesome. On to actual game design then!
Hey man, so I got the API to work with my unity project (both get and submit scores), but it is full of duplicates from playtesting. Can we somehow reset the scoreboard (or should we just get a new key?), and is there a way that we could limit the number of “entries” so that our scoreboard keeps track of only top lets say 10 scores?
Hi man, just grab a new API key for your final version. All scores are stored, I just filter them before displaying them in the leaderboard table – check out https://dollarone.games/elympics/leaderboards.html (your game will be added here)
If you want to display the scores in your game or on a page you can grab your scores from https://dollarone.games/elympics/getHighscores?gamename=my_game_name (or username=my_user_name – or key=xxx although you should keep your API key to yourself!)
I uploaded my game, and it uses unique=true to display the ingame leaderboards, but there are duplicates on the elympics/leaderboards.html. Is there a checkbox that I’m missing, or does the server maybe just need some time?
No, it’s just added manually
I have updated your leaderboard!
Wow awesome! I’m going away for a couple of days, but when I get back I’ll try to make something for this!
Do we have to use the provided scoreboard system? Whenever I enter scores it just shows the text “OK”. I am presuming this is because it is not open yet?
That just means that the score was accepted! I’m adding a getHighscores API so you can grab your scores as well! You don’t have to use the scoreboard, but it would be cool if you did so we can have a single page with ALL the scores
edit: getHighscores is now a thing!
Thank you for the update
I’ve never participated in any game jam. Where do I submit my Game?
Hey! You just submit it on this site: http://ludumdare.com/compo/minild-72/?action=edit
You need to host your game or downloads somewhere though, the site doesn’t support that (yet)
Alright, thanks for the info
I did it!
hey, you’re the first to submit – well done!
@dollarone:
This is an awesome thing you did there! The first thing when reading the description was “how the hell am I gonna host a leaderboard?” Then you dropped the A bomb (with the API) and I got blown away. I’m so happy that you provided this opportunity for us to make games and have leaderboards in them. Thank you very much. And as kind of an appreciation now I must enter your MiniLD 😀
Thank you again, you are awesome!
Also I just realized that this is minild #72…72 is my lucky number so I have to “compete” 😀
thanks for the enthusiasm! 😀
Wow great idea! I really wish I had the time to submit a game for this. I’ve had highscores for all my latest LD submissions as I think it adds a lot to the experience. It would be a great idea to have such a system in place for all future LD’s.. but I guess that would require a bit of work.
Maybe it could be added to the new site? Alternatively I’m happy to add a widget that one could add to a webpage and keep the API open for future LDs!
I don’t think that would be a good idea. One of great things in LD for me is the great diversity of games and styles, all following one theme. Having something like high score submission integrated in the LD itself would skew a lot of the games towards high score based games.
yeah, that’s a valid point!
I’m in! I hope I can finish in time and get the API to work.
In-ish, depending on other workload
The best olympic events are obviously town planning, held from 1928 in Amsterdam to 1948 in London and mixed sculpturing, from 1912 in Stockholm till the 1924 games in Paris.
This is the first time I’ll be participating in a Game Jam. Looking forward to submit my game and be destroyed by the internet feedback… LOL. But seriously, really excited about being part of it.
I didn’t use the API in my entry, but gave a link with my key. I hope people submit their real scores. The game was so small, I couldn’t bring myself to add some net code. It’s less than 200 loc.
Could I submit a game that I originally made for a previous MiniLD and have since updated and added a leaderboard to?
hey, you can do whatever you want
however the main intention with MiniLDs is to make new games, so I’d encourage you to do that! Perhaps a sequel or an improved version of your previous game?
Hi there.
Thanks for the service.
Anyway you can add filter code to the getHighScores() to not return duplicate username entries only the highest?
+1 for this. Dollarone said “I just filter them before displaying them in the leaderboard table” earlyer in the comments, so maybe we can get the filtered results with getHighScores() ?
I think he meant filtering on your end. You get all the scores in a json and if you want to filter them you just have to write some simple code to do so.
You can now add unique=true to your getHighscores call and only get the highest score per player-name!
Sweet, you are amazing dollarone.
Thanks for that. I will try it out for sure.
Leaderboards page is currently down. Is there a problem?
ah thanks for the heads-up! fixed now!
Thanks!
Just a heads up on the format=text option for getting scores, which seems to return the string quotes and literal \n as text. Did you update it intentionally? If so I’ll update my app. Thanks for great work on the API!
Ah! I was trying to debug why wan’s game’s leaderboard didn’t work. Have reverted the change. Thanks for the heads-up!
Thanks! Made my game support both just to not break when you reverted. Can verify my game still works with the scores now. Awesome!
Btw, could you please remove the top scores for my game? The following ones: Yuting, BloodyHero, GANDALF, Begntt, Torslanda. They were made by me before balancing the difficulty. Thanks!
Done!
Just submitted my game, seems like the leaderboard site is down right now though. Also I accidentally added a bunch of duplicates to my leaderboard and it looks very messy right now, could you perhaps remove the scores so it is clean from start, thanks.
Done!
dollarone.games is down.
yep, great time for apache to throw a wobbly! looking into it
Thanks!
Wow… i made it 5 minutes before deadline… it was my first serious deadline runner (i preffer to stay calmed and relaxed and have work done way before deadline 😀 ) http://ludumdare.com/compo/minild-72/?action=preview&uid=88709
The deadline is utc -12 , so we have like 11 more hours. right? I havent submited yet 😮 https://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/timezone/utc-12
I think I won’t make the deadline, but I want to finish this game.
Will this API be open after the MiniLD is finished?
Yes it will! I will also leave the submissions open as long as possible
Thank you very much
my game (Horde) isn’t showing up on the leaderboards page yet, could you have a look dollarone?
thanks!
I’ve added it! Will add the rest of the new games tonight!
Amazing to see so many games being made for the MiniLD!! 😀
awesome, thanks!
Hey dollar one, if its not too much of a pain could you reset the scores for my game schmup trainer. I resubmitted and reduced the number of enemies and other stuff so its not possible to reach the same high scores anymore. Also most of the entries are just me testing.. thanks. Also I fixed teh bug you spotted with it submitting the score twice. Thanks
NP, done!
great, thanks.
Can you also please add my game “Don’t Push Me”?
Done! Nice game
Thank you!!
So if the submission is staying open for a while I suppose it wouldn’t be considered breaking any rules to keep resubmitting updated versions with major (non bug fix) changes? What do people think?
Whether anyone can be bothered to keep replaying them is a different question.
yeah, go for it! I still haven’t finished my game
Hi dollarone.
I registered Hostile Hyper Jump to the leaderboards. Not sure if any of the GET requests are getting through as it’s not showing up. Can you check please?
awesome, that’s great! I’ve added it to the page! I have to add them manually because there’s a lot of test API keys out there
Cool, thanks!
When will the next MiniLD Start?!
rumours has it “very soon” …
¿¿There is any way to limit the number of scores?? I mean in the query.
As the number of players grows also the data received does. 
No, there isn’t, although in hindsight that would have been a good idea!
Sorry but I do not see superspaceholocaust on the record table. Have I to do something to make it being shown there?
now added!