When I was writing about my adventures with Game Center, I forgot to mention the Game Center leaderboards I created for LetterMiner. Currently there are three leaderboards. The main leaderboard shows the highest level you reached in the game. I went with highest level reached instead of high score because each level has a point quota to reach to move to the next level. When you reach the quota you move to the next level. There isn’t going to be much variation in the scores unless someone mines a high scoring word as their last word in the level.

The second leaderboard shows the length of the longest word you mined while playing the game. I would also like to show the longest word, but I haven’t figured out how to do that with Game Center. Game Center leaderboards require a score. The score can be either a number or a time, but it can’t be a word. Game Center has a context property you can attach to a score. I thought I could store the word in this property, but doing so crashes the game. Displaying the longest word you mined is on hold for now. I store each word you mine as you play so if I ever figure out a way to display the longest mined word in Game Center, you won’t miss out on a long word you mined in the past.

The final leaderboard shows the number of unique words you have mined. Developing LetterMiner means playing it a lot. As I played LetterMiner in its early stages, what kept my interest was finding words I hadn’t mined before. So I decided to store the words each player mines so I could determine when someone mines a new word. When you mine words in LetterMiner, the text color of the proposed word changes if you find a new word, and you get a bonus for mining a word for the first time. With the final leaderboard you can keep track of how many words you’ve mined.