Amazon GameSparks adds leaderboards to drive player engagement

Amazon GameSparks is a managed service that provides game developers features for building, running, and scaling the backend of their games; and is currently in preview. Today, we are excited to announce the addition of a new leaderboards feature to help drive player engagement.

Game developers have told us they want to spend less time on building and scaling backend services, and more time delivering the best player experience possible; and leaderboards continues to be one of the most requested features. Now developers can configure, edit, and display leaderboards in-game using Amazon GameSparks. Leaderboards can help you drive increased player engagement by tracking and displaying player progression, hosting competitive tournaments, and rewarding player wins.

Sample in-game leaderboard

Within the Amazon GameSparks console you can configure and access the following leaderboard functions:

• Set up and configure leaderboards with in game configuration documents
• Submit scores to update leaderboard entries
• Sort in ascending/descending order
• Query for the positions and scores of a set of entities
• Read a leaderboard entry (rank, score, and entity identifier)
• List all leaderboards configurations

Leaderboards in the GameSparks console

These leaderboard functions can be accessed via Cloud Code once a leaderboard has been set up. For example, to add or modify a player’s score in your leaderboard, you can use the Leaderboard().SetEntry() operation in Cloud Code. To get one or more entries based on rank from your leaderboard, you can use the Leaderboard().GetEntries() operation. You can also use the Leaderboard().GetEntriesAround() operation in Cloud Code to get players and their score above or below the specified entry.

To start using leaderboards and to check out examples of using these Cloud Code operations, visit the Leaderboards documentation here, login to the GameSparks console, and begin creating your game today. There are no charges for using Amazon GameSparks while in preview.