I put the finishing touches on the Leaderboard yesterday, and it is now live. Snowferno.com has been collecting game scores all during the beta period, so we already have a nice heap of data.

Congrats (so far...) to Baller77718 who leads the pack, and quite definitively -- although s/he has yet to conquer all 20 levels.

Some key features of the Leaderboard:

• Recently Played games gives a snapshot of the last few levels completed worldwide
• All-Time Top 5 by Level lists the best 5 scores for every level, mirroring what you see in-game on each "Level Complete" screen.
• Top 50 Completed Games sums up the best times by level for the brave snowballs that have conquered the Inferno.
• Click on any screen name to view that player's game stats and recently played levels. Stats include that player's best level times, total attempts, fallouts, meltouts, wins, their win %, and the score ranking per level.
• Personalized screen names are coming very soon, so you won't have to be your auto-assigned Inferno character forever.

Global Leaderboard participation is voluntary. "Post Scores" is enabled by default when you first launch Snowferno. To change your preference, be sure your device has Internet access, then tap Settings > Score Board from the main screen and toggle the setting there. NOTE: this does not delete your scores, it only changes whether your scores are displayed to the public. You can enable or disable "Post Scores" ad nauseam to suit your fancy. :)

Let us know what you think - comments are welcome: improvements, (errors?), suggestions for more Snowferno data mining goodness... I have been playing around with some graph-drawing libraries, but all the charts I've made so far are pretty ugly. But look for possible future improvements in that direction, too.

For the technically curious, the Leaderboard is powered by a custom WordPress plugin that hooks into the handy filters and actions provided by the WordPress core. Our own custom API gathers and stores the Leaderboard data in supplementary tables alongside the WordPress data.

I originally tried to find an off-the-shelf WordPress plugin for this functionality, but I found that the "community" aspect of WordPress is one area (admittedly, I think) that it is lacking. WP is a terrifically flexible foundation, and just having the blog and account management functions at our fingertips has been an immense time-saver. Now that we've built our first game website, maybe for future projects we'll look at a WordPress MU, Drupal, or very likely the highly-anticipated, 2.0 CodeIgniter rewrite of ExpressionEngine.