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It’s not enough to have the player win; the player needs to mark their territory. The player needs to warn off the other speed-running predators on the digital landscape. “This is my best record, attempting to beat this is an exercise in futility. Every time you knock me back, I’ll retake the mantle and assume ownership of the pride.” This is all done with a gamertag; a unique moniker to every gamer.

Speedrunning and Rooftop Renegade are a perfect combination. The game is fast paced, the protagonist, Svet, is propelled forwards by powerful hover blades known as ‘Chrono-Kicks’, and going too slow results in her untimely capture and thus, game over. A Rooftop Renegade leaderboard was first developed as an in-office competition, an excuse for the Melonheads to peacock their best times to the rest of the team — it seemed only natural to introduce friends to this as well.

AVCon 2018

When Rooftop Renegade was taken to its first public play event, AVCon 2018, the leaderboard followed suit. This time however, a dirty, in-office whiteboard plastered with concepts and inside jokes wasn’t going to cut it. This leaderboard had to be digital, it had to be pretty, but most importantly, it had to let those top 10 constantly changing speedrunners announce to everyone at the Adelaide Convention Centre that they were the fastest Renegades around…

The 2018 leaderboard was nothing more than a styled table written in HTML and CSS. It could display 10 gamertags at a time, their current record, look pretty… and that’s about it. The player’s gamertag and time still had to be entered in manually by one of the Melonheads who were also required to reorder the times on the fly. If a player beat their own record multiple times in a row, that melonhead had to keep going behind the table, find the correct tag, update it and reorder the rankings before a sharp-eyed speedrunner commented that 01:41 is faster than 01:43. It didn’t help that we hadn’t implemented milliseconds into our scoring yet, which led to a lot of runners pleading their 01:41 was faster than another runner’s 01:41. Oh, and this was all done through notepad with the team needing an introduction to HTML that morning.

AVCon 2019

“Alright, if we’re going to do this, the system needs to be flawless.”

When AVCon 2019 started approaching, there was talk of not including the leaderboard. It may make players too competitive, it may limit the amount of people can play the game, if it was anything like AVCon 2018, it was going to be too much of a hassle to keep track of. “Alright, if we’re going to do this, the system needs to be flawless” sighed Pat during one of our rare outings for fresh air. The new leaderboard would need to be accessible to anyone on the team, reorder the fastest times automatically, and include an optional email address to contact the speedrunners and let them know who held the best times by the weekend’s close.

To make the leaderboard entry accessible to the rest of the team, I created a simple form with the fields ‘gamertag’, ‘time’ and ‘email’. Upon hitting submit, the player’s gamertag and time would display on a separate monitor. For this to work, HTML and CSS alone wasn’t going to cut it. We were going to need proper programming and a database.

By the Saturday morning of AVCon, the leaderboard was built and ready to be populated with the best times Adelaide gamers had to offer – albeit for one issue. While you could enter new times for new runners, replacing an existing runner’s time was going to be an issue.

Every time you hit ‘submit’ on an online form, there is a lot of code tied to that button that copies the data entered, inserts it into a database and then, if necessary, displays that database. My limited knowledge of PHP, SQL and databases means I didn’t know the code to update existing data in a database (we’re all spoilt with Microsoft excel!) Enter the white knight, Kerri, Patrick’s partner and Melonhead Games’ Morale Officer, who with her extensive knowledge of databases was able to fix my work and allow the team to update player times when necessary.

By the end of Sunday, the leaderboard had proved a success! The speedrunning setup at our booth was constantly populated with Renegades trying to top the mantle, whilst others watched their position on the leaderboard go up and down. By the end of the weekend we had secured over 50 unique runner times. Not only did this feel great to have so many people interested in Rooftop Renegade, it was also a great source of feedback on how fast players can complete our hardest levels.

Whilst the design of our AVCon 2019 leaderboard was a step in the right direction, there’s still more work needed for the perfect system. The best systems are ones running in the background that the player is not aware of. Before our next public speedrun, we need to brainstorm ways to make this process as easy for the players (and the Melonheads) as possible.