Leaderboard Game

Will you be able to beat the world’s top ChipWit programmers? One of the features we’re most excited about in the new reboot of ChipWits is making it a leaderboard game. Here’s a preview of the leaderboard in our latest development build:

The leaderboard is enabled on some missions, and lets you compare your solution with those of other players worldwide.

The Thrill of Leaderboards

One of the reasons I’m personally excited about leaderboard support is that I used to run my ChipWits against each other when I played ChipWits as an 11-year-old. Here’s a scan of a competition series I patiently ran with all the ChipWits I wrote vs. all 8 missions on the Commodore 64 version of ChipWits:

Pitting ChipWits against each other to see which would get the highest score was as exciting to me as watching BattleBots. I would spend countless hours and days running these competitions.

Programming Competitions

Later in life, I entered several programming competitions, most notably getting to the world finals with my RIT team in the ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest. I also organized several programming competitions at my school and work, and continue to do so today.

As programmers, programming competitions are the closest thing we have to a spectator sport.

ChipWits as a Leaderboard Game

ChipWits works really well as a programming competition platform and a leaderboard game. We have support for several types of competitions, including:

1. Maximum score given limited cycles
2. Maximum cycles remaining given a specific objective
3. Minimum chips used to achieve an objective (a form of code golf)
4. Maximum median score in a series of randomized missions

And we’re adding more!

In early playtesting, this is a feature some of our players have found most engaging. There’s nothing more motivating than seeing another player beat your score by 100 points and working furiously to one-up them.

We can’t wait to see the clever and creative solutions our players come up with to top the leaderboard!

Discussion

What features do you want to see in a leaderboard? What similar games have you played that have particularly engaging leaderboard systems? We’d love to hear from you in the comments section, below.