Neon White developer interview: How to make the perfect leaderboards

The first person shooter should be picked up Neon whiteThe sheer desire to complete each level was overwhelming. Shooter takes players through linear courses that you must complete quickly. You can also use cards which give your characters special abilities like bombs and extra jumps. The grind in Neon White felt enjoyable in and of itself — yet out of seemingly nowhere, I became the kind of player who whittled down my time by mere milliseconds. This joy is not only due to the mechanical minutiae but it also has one more aspect: The leaderboards.

Neon white, each level has a global leaderboard in addition to a smaller leaderboard that’s shared among your friends list. Since the dawn of video gaming, leaderboards played an important role. Neon whiteIt made me more concerned about my scores than I have ever been in recent memories. Polygon met Ben Esposito from Zoom to discuss the innovative implementation of leaderboards. Neon whiteHow they have influenced it, as well as how social factors can make modern games more memorable.

According to Esposito, the team had the idea of competing for better times in mind “from the beginning.” It all started in 2018, when Esposito had burned through a few failed demo ideas for a card-based first person shooter. Esposito had an idea for a shooter platformer in which you randomly get cards and battle through arenas. The designer said that playing with random weapons all the time “wasn’t very fun.” Nonetheless, that demo led to one last demo focused on linear levels with a set number of cards. Esposito gave the demo to his friend. The friend then sent Esposito a list detailing how many times each level took.

Image: Angel Matrix/Annapurna Interactive

“I looked at that, and I was like, I could totally beat that.” So Esposito started playing and learning all the ways to complete the level more quickly. “We felt like, This game has a lot of fun, especially the optimization.. And it’s only heightened by having someone to play against. So, you know, that was kind of the moment when the actual production of the game kicked off.”

Neon whiteYou must defeat every demon to complete each course. You will receive a medal in the form of a gold, silver, or Ace depending on your speed.

Esposito said the team wanted to be “super super careful” about the way they implemented leaderboards in the game. The rest of his team wanted to encourage competition without making it impossible for players to achieve high scores. They wanted players to learn about the game, and then become more interested in their global score. “This is something I feel, and I think a lot of the team felt, because we’re notThe best gamers,” he said.

To accomplish this, the game didn’t just have to be approachable — players had to get something out of failing, too. “We wanted to build this idea of replaying a level being the fun of the game, rather than a chore,” he said. Esposito developed the insight system. This allows players unlock levels such as the ability to switch between pathing hints and ghost characters to show off your best run. This seems to be working.

Image: Angel Matrix/Annapurna Interactive via Polygon

“When we did the demo for the game, the leaderboard precision, in terms of the amount of decimal places, was only, I think, like two decimal places or something. The demo was released within a day and people began playing it hundreds or even hundreds of time. And we found really quickly that people were mad at us, because the precision wasn’t high enough to give them a higher place than people who did it, you know, .001 second slower than them.”

I asked Esposito why he thought leaderboards have played such a central role in games, and why they’re a persisting feature in modern titles. “No matter if [games] are single-player or multiplayer, they’re still social.” Esposito recalled the image of huddling around an arcade cabinet as people take turns playing and trying to get a high score.

This idea is mirrored in my personal experience. Neon white. As I was playing, the friend leaderboard provided me with the motivation to get through each level quicker. Maybe I wanted to beat my old boss at a level, or just show another friend that I didn’t absolutely suck at a shooter for once. A friend I had not seen in a while also sent me a message to see how she beat that level. In another instance, a friend I hadn’t heard from in several months texted me to say she saw that I had been playing and complimented my scores.

“I wanted to bring back the classic, like, high score table because it does enable that social component that makes this game not feel like, Oh, I’m just fighting its computer. I’m actually like, you know, part of some big thing.”