Hi! I'm thinking about building a free online leaderboard service for Playdate games distributed outside Catalog.
Developers would be able to register a game, create one or more leaderboards, get an API key, and use a small Lua library to submit and retrieve scores over HTTPS.
The goal would be to make adding online high scores to sideloaded / itch.io games as simple as possible.
Before I start building it, I'd like to know if there is actually interest in something like this.
Would you use such a service in your Playdate games? And are there any features you would consider essential?
I've thought about it for my itch versions. I was just going to use https://www.leadr.gg/#pricing because it's pretty much impossible for a playdate game to leave the free tier. and the Rest API is super simple.
The reason in the end that I didn't go for it, is I didn't want to have to ask every catalog player for networking permissions and if I made it itch only, there would only be like 10 people on the itch-only leaderboards. Didn't seem worth it for me.
All that said, do what you want to do. It's a hobby after all!
I came to a similar conclusion. I also found Talo, which already provides a free hosted backend and REST API, so building another backend probably doesn’t make much sense. A good Lua wrapper might be enough.
The networking permission is the tricky part. I think the player should clearly understand why the game wants internet access before the system dialog appears.
I made a flowchart with the main cases. It looks a bit complex at first, but the logic is pretty straightforward. Ideally, the Lua library would handle all of this out of the box, with customizable messages.
