Hello and welcome to devlog 8. This time i`m going to talk about the new leaderboards and what`s coming next.  

Leaderboards are here! 

This was something I always wanted to add to the game. I never included it into the roadmap though because I wasn’t sure of its priority compared to the other features in the pipeline. Over the last month, I realised that its important to have some form of social leaderboards. This`ll get players online a bit more, and hopefully competing against each other for the top spots!

Right now, there are 2 leaderboards. Total kills, and weekly top kills. Total kills will be a persistent statistic, showing the top 10 players ranked by multiplayer kills. Weekly kills is more like a tournament, that shows the current weeks top 10 players by kills. This will reset every 7 days, and the winner will be announced over on discord and twitter! Eventually, I want to add real prizes for these tournaments, such as online store gift coupons. Let me know in the comments if you have any ideas for these prizes.

Now I know how to quickly set up new leaderboards, I can add more based on other stats whenever needed. For example, weekly top 10 based on Free for all rounds won, or most XP gained, and so on. I can put these on a playlist to keep it varied.

The leaderboards are done on playfab and luckily there are functions built into the playfab GSDK on unreal engine. Below shows how I can simply pull the stats based on the value name, and then get other information from the results, such as the players display name, their rank and their score. (note: you have to finish the game round in order for your stats to be uploaded to the server)

Here i simply call the leaderboard stat "WeeklyKills" which I created on playfab. It returns information about the leaderboard itself, such as the reset time.

Then I run a loop for the top 10 results, which are conveniently already sorted. I can get their display name, position and stat value. I also store a local set of the results and use that, instead of constantly getting data from the server every time you press the button.

Speaking of playfab, the next step is to move all the player stats and challenge unlock progress to an online cloud save. In hindsight this should`ve been done before launch, but now I fully understand how to utilize playfab online services it shouldn`t be too hard to make the switch to fully online cloud saves (don’t worry, your XP and LEVEL is already saved on the cloud).

Next up in the pipeline is localisation. I will add 2 new languages, Latam Spanish and Japanese. I`ve already set up the program side of things, now I just need to go through and localise all the content. Luckily, there aren’t too many strings to do (Beans are simple).

If you would like to see the game localised into any other languages, let me know and I`ll see what I can do.

Jump into the discord and chat with me and the other members of the community. See you in game!

https://discord.gg/6vcRDyfVzr