> it allows players who get stumped at a certain level to save their high score to the leaderboard without finishing the game
Have you considered saving the high score after every level automatically?
Have you considered saving the high score after every level automatically?
There's a section in the post about the ethos behind the scoring system and how it's designed to incentivize good gameplay while accommodating for speedrunners as a non-primary audience. It also ties in with the part about sawtooth difficulty curves and skipping levels. So some of these considerations can come into play here. In general I tried to reproduce the retro feel of arcade games without taking away from the strategy/puzzle solving kernel.
But yes, definitely. That's a valid approach too.