Creating a simple leaderboard

Obviously, creating a leaderboard will require some sort of database to keep a tab of the scores. As in the previous chapter, we will use PHP and MySQL to implement the server side of our game. However, unlike in Chapter 7, Making a Multiplayer Game, playing together the solution presented here can be viable in real life. Requesting and saving highscores is an operation that takes very little server resources and isn't called that often; for each user, we will approximately query the server once every 10 seconds, as opposed to where we queried it many times per second for our MMORPG in Chapter 7, Making a Multiplayer Game.

First, we will need a metric to use as a score. Here, we will simply use the time it took for the player to finish a level, in seconds. The following diagram shows the user interaction workflow that we will use:

As a UI, we will use two screens that we will implement in the same way we implemented the interface for the last chapter—simple div...