Accessibility Mode

Click here to disable accessibility mode and re-enable page styles.

What's arcade2000?

arcade2000 is a cross-platform online high score site with many special features not seen in other score APIs. These features are intended to make all the games connected to arcade2000 more fun, social, and creative, nurture friendly rivalries, and encourage people who like one game to try the others.

If you're making a score-based game with a high skill ceiling, arcade2000 could be a really good fit for you!

Who's making it?

Ultimate Walrus (solo indie dev)

What's it do?

(you can click on list items to skip to that section)
What's working: What's planned:

Five games connected

Evil Egg

EXCA

Ocean Planet

Kersploosh!

BIGBOMB

(note: this footage is from the unreleased BIGBOMB v2. The currently available BIGBOMB v1 is a gamejam game I slapped together in 48 hours, definitely the weakest game on the site though I'm hoping to fix that with v2!)

Customization

arcade2000 charts are a lot more fun than your typical high score chart! As a demonstration, here, have an iframe of the live arcade2000 high score chart for Evil Egg (contains user-generated content):

Users can upload their own banner images to go by their names. Their username is meant to stay consistent, but they have a short decorator text that they can change at any time. Users can even craft their own home page in HTML that you’ll see when you click on their name in the chart (try clicking MOUSMINE or UltimateWalrus in the above chart for example). All these features have a moderation pipeline built in, and you can set it to be as strict or as lax as you need for your game, even separating out moderation settings by platform.

These features also have an API so, if you want, you can even show things like the banners on your in-game high score charts. I have code written for Godot and Unity that makes this easy. You can see it in action in Ocean Planet, which is a Unity game, and BIGBOMB, which is a Godot game.

Of course the score charts are multiplatform and you won’t be tied to any specific service like Steam. It does have Steam integration though.

Replays

If you click on a score for Ocean Planet, you’ll see what I call a mini-replay, a small recording of the player’s position which plays right in the browser. Here is an example:


This is for a platformer game, and tracks the user's position through the level. Ideally, this will eventually have an image of the level behind it so you can tell where the player was going. It would even be possible to have the top ten players “race” in a single mini replay, though this is not yet implemented. In the future I want to expand on this concept depending on the needs of the games.

The site also supports storing an in-game replay and retrieving it from the scoreboard as needed. Ideally, every game on the site would have at minimum a score progression mini replay like EXCA, because otherwise it’s just a little harder for the scores to feel authentic. Even a bare bones score progression replay makes a score chart feel more alive.

Video clips

Players can (in theory) upload video clips directly from a game to arcade2000, similarly to how the game HYPER DEMON works. This functionality has been built out, mostly what's left is just making a game that actually utilizes it. I have it working in Godot. If there's a compelling use case for it in your game that uses an engine different from Godot, maybe I can help you figure it out!

Scoreboard filtering

arcade2000 allows users to create advanced board filters, each of which have their own unique URL. This lets players come up with new ways to compete with each other. For example, you could see who is able to get the worst score while still getting a difficult achievement. You can see who was the first in the world to get a certain achievement, or the latest. You can see who got a certain combination of achievements most quickly in a run. You can see who got a certain achievement with the least or most amount of a certain subscore like jumps, enemies killed, etc. While current games don’t use it much, all of this is possible right now with the advanced scoreboard filters, and since the filter has a unique URL, players can share it around to compete on a certain filtered board.

Current games that utilize this best so far are Evil Egg and Kersploosh! (click the advanced filters icon).

Achievements

arcade2000 has traditional “one shot” achievements, but the achievements used in board filters are “run achievements.” These achievements can be obtained on a per-run basis and might be things like “complete the game without using six-numbered dice,” “parry a triangle enemy,” etc. They’re displayed next to scores on the chart, and in large part the intent is for them to be things that would make things more interesting for filtered boards. It might be one thing to see who can beat your racetrack the fastest, and another to see who can beat it while also doing three backflips.

Badge boards

This is a new feature not yet integrated into any ingame charts, but it’s currently usable on the site. If you look at my profile here, I have a little grid of achievements that I want to brag about.

Note that not all of these are traditional binary "achievements," some are just me wanting to show off what my rank in a chart is! These could be from any game on arcade2000, so it will hopefully be a way of “cross pollination” so people who like one game can find their way to the others. If users were to move from an E-rated game to a T-rated one, for example, I would probably have to figure out some kind of way of handling that. I built in logic for game ratings, but so far all the games are aimed at everyone so it’s not a concern yet.

This ties back into filtered boards. It gives players a way to get excited about competing on filtered boards, because you can advertise your rank in a filtered board on your badge board.

Omni boards

Omni boards are scorecharts computed from the average of a user’s place in all the different games, so in order to compete on that board, they have to play all the games! This is another way I’m hoping to encourage cross-pollination. The "Angel board" includes free+paid games, the "Devil board" includes only free games, and the "Sicko board" is a curated selection of weird scoreboard filters that force people to play in interesting ways (e.g. who can get the worst score in Evil Egg while still beating the game).

Twitch & Steam integration

arcade2000 is integrated with Steam. I want player experience to be as frictionless as possible. When players finish their first run in Ocean Planet, an arcade2000 account is automatically created for their name, and tied in with the Steam account. A bonus of the Steam integration is you can display friends-only charts.

For non Steam games, all the player must be asked to do is type a name once. Assuming the name isn’t taken, arcade2000 will make them an account and use their device ID as a password. They can click a link in the game and the site will give them a soft login in a browser window, at which point they could set a password if they want to play on multiple machines or multiple games. You can see this in action in BIGBOMB and EXCA.

For Twitch integration, check out the example game. There is a small "high score chart" of which Fortnite Twitch streamers have the most viewers, and an embed of the top steam. If you get a Twitch ID for your game, you can put this on top of your chart!

Cross-platform features

arcade2000 is not tied to any specific platform. It also has a feature for cross-platform saves built in, which I think is super important if you’re going to make a cross-platform game. You want to encourage people who really love your game to buy it on multiple platforms, and an arcade2000 account would allow them to move their save data around.

Backups are kept of the save data. Since save datas on two different machines can diverge, I feel it’s best to let the user decide when to save to the cloud. When the data is loaded from the cloud, you could first back up the existing local data to the cloud. If you do that, I think you’d have something that is better at not losing people’s data than some existing major cloud save services.

Future development

More freeware games

In addition to finishing up BIGBOMB v2 I currently have two prototypes I want to make into arcade2000 games! Plans change, but right now they are all planned to be freeware:

Hekks from Space

Arklyte

Discord integration

It should be possible to automatically fetch the logged in Discord account ID from the computer. This would allow "log in with Discord" to prevent people losing accounts, but would also allow a local leaderboard Discord bot (similar to HYPER DEMON's).

Chat system

I have an integrated chat system planned for this site, intended to be more like a forum or chatroom than like social media. It’ll allow people to comment directly on any score, replay, etc. The current plan is to make players pass a fairly easy par score in one of the games to access the chat system. This prevents bots and trolls from casually creating accounts and submitting content, and creates a private and safe space away from web crawlers, corporations, AI trainers, etc. My hope is to create a safe place for players of all ethnicities, orientations, identities, etc.

Japanese language support

I’m a beginner Japanese learner and I plan on making a dedicated Japanese version of the site (and my integrated games) to the best of my limited ability. I’m down to add other languages if someone who knows the basics of that language is willing to help. Ideally, when there’s a chat system, there will be some built-in tools for multilingual communication.

More website interactivity

If you check out my other site ultimatewalrus.com, it has quite a bit of realtime interactivity in it, and I’d like to make arcade2000 feel more alive in that way, when I have time.

About the project

arcade2000 is a site I originally started making because I realized I needed a place to store replay data. I was inspired by Sorath’s games Devil Daggers and HYPER DEMON, and I realized that being able to save and view replays from online playtesters was probably part of what allowed Sorath to make such fun games. If you can find people who love your game and watch their replays, you can tune your game to be perfect for those who will love it the most. I also saw how their site’s replay features made the games more social for the players, and helped them learn to play in a more organic way.

Aspiring to make games as good as Sorath’s, I ended up frontloading a bunch of effort into a general-purpose site that has anything I might want for a high score game, and I’m letting other devs connect to it too. The bar for quality has already been set quite high with EXCA and Ocean Planet. My game BIGBOMB was a 48 hour gamejam game and is actually the least polished game there, but I’m hoping to fix that with BIGBOMB v2.

Selling indie games is hard these days. Selling score-based games with high skill ceilings is probably even harder. I think there is actually a ton of demand for that genre, even more so if you count the people who would like that type of game if they tried it. But it will always be a niche genre, and Steam / social media algorithms tend to favor games with mass appeal. Wouldn't it be nice if there was just a dedicated spot to go for that particular game genre?

So, I’m hoping arcade2000 can become a sort of alliance of arcade game devs. If one game gets popular, the other games will benefit, and hopefully it’ll be a continuing feedback loop. My goal is to build a community on arcade2000, with an eventual chat system, so it can be a go-to place specifically for high score games with a high skill ceiling. Speedrun.com would be my closest competitor, but it has an all-encompassing scope that includes AAA games like Call of Duty and Diablo. I want to build a smaller, more focused community, with more social features that nurture creativity and friendly rivalries, that makes players want to try all the games. I have a decent runway, so my current intent is to release freeware, let devs with good games connect for free, and wait until the site hopefully gets popular before I bother to release anything people can actually buy to support my endeavors.

Why Comic Sans?

Since Comic Sans is a font often scoffed at due to its past association with amateur graphic designers, maybe I should explain. This site actually uses Comic Shanns, a Comic Sans-inspired (and open licensed) monospace font. You barely see Comic Sans anywhere these days, so I feel it gives the site more of an identity. Personally I think Comic Shanns has a friendly, non-corporate vibe that doesn't make it seem like arcade2000 takes itself too seriously! This website is for fun. I would rather err on the side of "ugly but fun" than have it be clean but sterile (though you'll note there is a handicap icon at the top of this page, as well as most arcade2000 pages, which will strip almost all formatting from the page).

Interested?

Please email me!