Yesterday I published an update to sCatter that adds live in-game display of your overall and 24-hour rank. I’m using Scoreloop for the online high scores leaderboard, and so far I had just implemented the simplest form of integration – if you clicked on the ‘Scores’ button in the main menu, it launched the ScoreLoop activity. The analytics showed that very few people actually clicked on that button. I knew there was room for improvement there, but I didn’t have any ideas.
Then I played a game that showed you your overall rank right in the game screen, and that updated as your score increased. I thought that was a great idea, but I couldn’t figure out a way to implement that with Scoreloop. I toyed with the idea of writing my own high-scores client/server, but I wasn’t looking forward to that. Then last week, I saw another Scoreloop-enabled game that had in-game ranks, and I knew it could be done with Scoreloop. It took a bit of digging to find the CoreSocial API, that was tucked away in a sub-directory that I hadn’t looked at.
Once I figured that out, implementing it was fairly easy. Every time you increase your high score, the game now sends a request to Scoreloop’s servers for ranking information. The ranks are shown in the level selection screen. The request/response typically takes just a few seconds, so you finish a level, get back to the level selection screen, and within a few seconds, your rank updates.
I think it’s kinda cool to be able to see how you’re doing against the competition without having to leave the game. Hopefully this encourages people to play a little longer to try and improve their scores 
If you’ve played the game before and after this update, what do you think? Does this make the game more interesting?