Our leaderboard design required some flexibility that was not offered by Game Center or Play Games. In addition to a global leaderboard, we needed to have a limited time leaderboard which kept the sum of all pionts scored by the player in a time span of two weeks - and then reset it at the end of two weeks. We also had to show player avatars next to their leaderboard entries. Neither option was available in the default leaderboad services. Another nice-to-have feature was to be able to have a common global leaderboard for all players of the game, regardless of their platform ( iOS or Android ).

We kept a local copy of the player’s all time highscore and limited time scores, fetched at game launch. We reported the all time highscore to the server whenever the player beat their highscore. For the limited time score, we added the player’s score after every gameplay session and reported it to the server to update their limited time score. To reset the score locally, the game checked for the ‘force reset flag’ at every launch, and reset the score to zero whenever that flag was found set. Additionally, when the leaderboard data was fetched to show in game, it could read the avatar key for each player and render the appropriate avatar against each leaderboard entry.


This way, each player’s all time highscore was tracked on the leaderboard. The limited time leaderboard only showed the sum of points scored by the player in the specified time duration. Every player’s avatar was also shown next to their name on the leaderboard screen. Also, the global highscore leaderboad now showed every player’s score, since the same database was available for both platforms.