I've been working on some upgrades in order to support BYOND's new high score rankings on the hub page. Currently, the hub rankings keep track of your total score, treasure, play time, total completed tombs and the number of unique tombs that you've visited.

(There's also a little bugged category that I'm waiting for BYOND's staff to fix, but we'll ignore that for now.)

However, in the background I've also added support for contest scores as well as certified rankings. What are those?

A contest score is a temporary category that will be shown for the duration of a contest. For example, suppose we have a contest to see who can acquire the best scores on a level called "Dark Tunnel". There would be a special release for a contest version of that level which will submit scores to a temporary ranking category named after the level. At that point, players can compete to see who can acquire the best score on that level - at the end of the contest duration, the player with the best score is the winner.

Certified rankings are scores that are based only on certified levels. A level can only be certified by the developer (me), or maybe some other people down the road. Having certified levels prevents people from just making a level that's nothing but a room full of gold that they pick up, then open a door to finish - thus boosting their score dramatically. Only levels that have been looked over and deemed worthy of being a part of the game will be certified.

Also to note, a player's "certified score" will be based on the sum total of their best scores for all the certified levels that they've played. So if you're playing the same level over and over, only your best score for that level will be recorded as part of your total. Thus, the best scores as shown in the ranking will be the people who've actually achieved the best scores, not just the people who've played the most levels (although that'll help!).

For now, none of the levels are certified, so we'll just stick with the current scoring system. At some point I'd like to create a much more thorough set of main levels in order to introduce players to each of the objects and obstacles and show them how to interact with them.