Request: Enable the scoreboard APIs currently reserved for Catalog games to be used in local caching mode by anyone.
High scores are an extremely common fixture in games. The scoreboard API is great, but it's reserved exclusively for Catalog games. I'd like to see it made available to anyone with graceful degradation such that it works with registered global scoreboards when they exist, and operates in a local, on-device-only fashion otherwise. The APIs already support local caching for times when the playdate is offline, so I'm essentially asking for that mode to be the standard mode of operation when a given board ID is not registered with Panic's scoreboard servers. In other words, online scoreboards would still be entirely exclusive to Catalog titles, but anyone could leverage the API to keep track of high scores.
The benefits I see are:
- Devs can take advantage of a standardized API for this common game feature
- Devs can use the same API across Catalog and non-catalog games
- Games which get accepted into the Catalog late in development (or even after) can automatically transition from local to online high scores once the board IDs are registered with Panic.
For this to work, the board IDs would need to be chosen by the developer, such that they can then request those IDs be used if and when they are accepted to catalog. That could probably work fine if the IDs were automatically prefixed with some unique identifier, such as that used for the game itself in pdxinfo.