MochiAds is pleased to announce our new Leaderboards service, which allows you to easily integrate high score tracking into your games. The service works much like MochiAds, in that you can easily add them to your game using only a couple of lines of code. Once you do, you’ll be able display a simple widget that allows your players to view your game’s top scores and submit their own.

The Leaderboards service is simple to use, but that doesn’t mean it’s short of features. You can add as many leaderboards as you want to your game, and the leaderboards themselves are very customizable. Here’s the features at a glance:

• Change widget colors to match your game.
• Track scores as numbers or times.
• Rank scores highest to lowest or lowest to highest.
• Display daily, weekly, monthly scores, or show all three.
• Show or hide statistics like dates, ranks or player location.
• You can show leaderboards without submitting a score.
• Usernames can be supplied by your system, or you can allow the player to enter it in the widget.
• Player names and last scores can persist from session to session, and you can retrieve this information to use in your game.

To get started with the Leaderboards service, you’ll first need to log in to MochiAds. You create and maintain your leaderboards on the MochiAds site, where there is a full-featured system for creation, customization and management of your leaderboards.

Each leaderboard belongs to a game in the system, so you can either add your game or work with one of your existing games. Just click on the “leaderboards” link on your game’s page (fig.a)

fig.a – The leaderboard link on the game overview page.

Click “Create Leaderboard” and you’ll be taken to a page where you can enter all of the settings for your leaderboard. You can define a title, which will appear on the widget, as well as tweak scoring settings, colors and which columns you want to display. You’ll be able to see all of the changes you make immediately in a live preview right on the page.

Once you’re done, click “Create Leaderboard.” On the next page you’ll see a download link. Download the ZIP package, get the example code and you’re ready to go! The ZIP package contains the API code you need for your game, as well as example implementations and documentation (fig.b)

   
fig.b - The ZIP package download and file structure.

All of the code is contained in a “mochi” folder within the AS2 or AS3 folder – just choose the version that your game is coded in. The API classes will work with the Flash IDE as well as with FlashDevelop using MTASC or MXMLC.

For detailed information about how to integrate and use the Leaderboards service, you can check out the online API documentation. Also, check out this great tutorial by Emanuele Feronato.

Also worth mentioning are some other cool features that you may not notice immediately. If you look at the sample game in the download, you’ll see a menu where you can start playing the game or immediately see top scores (fig.c). If you call the leaderboard with no parameters, you can display the top scores without submitting any score. This is great if you want to showcase your highscores on the main screen of your game.

fig.c - The sample game menu with welcome message showing last score.

Also, the “Enter Name” button allows you to see how the widget works if you send it an existing username. For instance, if you already have a user login on your game then you can send the username along with the score. In this case, the score will automatically be submitted when the leaderboard loads.

Finally, there’s one more really neat feature called “persistence.” This automatically saves the player’s name and last score when it is submitted. You can use the API to retrieve this information to display to the player the next time they play your game. That way, they can see what score they need to beat their personal best.

We hope you have fun with this exciting new service. We can’t wait to see it in your games!