Announcing Smolpxl Scores – a high score table for your game

It’s a very early beta for now, but I’m ready to announce Smolpxl Scores, which provides high-score tables for Free and Open Source games.

Each game can have multiple high-score tables – for example, you might want one for each level.

At the moment it’s deployed in my own web hosting and therefore written using the technologies that are most convenient for me to deploy there, which is PHP+MySQL. If it becomes more widely used and the performance suffers I guess I’ll ask for donations to host it somewhere else, and use more fashionable technologies.

To add a score you make a POST request like this:

curl https://scores.artificialworlds.net/api/v1/myappname/mytablename/ -d \
    '{"appId":"myappid","name":"Megan Tria", "score": 13.5, "notes": ""}'

and to look at some existing scores you can request them by pages:

curl 'https://scores.artificialworlds.net/api/v1/myappname/mytablename/?startRank=11&num=20'

or by name:

curl 'https://scores.artificialworlds.net/api/v1/myappname/mytablename/?startName=David%20Lloyd%20Geo&offset=-5&num=10'

The results are ordered by players’ scores, and are provided as JSON.

Each table stores only one score per player.

Of course, the API will evolve over time, but I hope that what I have now will be good enough to support some real-life games, and provide enough feedback to make it better.

As soon as people are actually using it, I will ensure the current API version (v1) remains stable, and release any incompatible updates as later versions.

If you’d like to use Smolpxl Scores to add a high-score table to your game, please create an issue at gitlab.com/smolpxl/smolpxl-scores/-/issues.

This service is only available to Free and Open Source games. Also, if someone abuses it (accidentally or on purpose) I will talk to them, and may eventually have to remove their access if we can’t fix the problem.