Initial Leaderboard and Player Profile

Summary

After a week away for work I was able to get back to the game dev grind and focus on the part I was dreading the most.. The multiplayer aspect of the game. I was able to take today to put together the framework for the leaderboard functionality as well as capturing the player profile so the scores can persist across playthroughs as well as eventually show a leaderboard of other player scores. While this was in fact tricky, it was a made a lot easier by leveraging a backend leaderboard tool. I did quite a bit of research and found a lot of tools out there, but the one I found that fit my low effort use case the most was one called LootLocker.

Before ultimately choosing this backend I decided upon it because I found it had pretty solid Unity API documentation as well as a discord server where others can chat and ask for support. This discord server ended up being the best part because I was stuck on an API call for the high score, posted a question about it, and got a response in minutes! That helped unblock me and then finish this basic outline of the leaderboard. The current functionality simply displays the player name, player score, and high score as well a simple button for the player to retry if they would like (I love how the paw technically pressed the button).

What is still needed?

• The leaderboard on the end game menu
• A start menu that will allow the player to change their name if they would like and also see the current leader board if they want
• Better cat tap physics (I think I want to add some logic to stop the paw if you click passed the ball so the physics work better)
• More Pawer Ups!
• Better UI sprites
• Improved ball physics