ID:53560
 
Keywords: digest
Last week, we mentioned that we'd be looking into achievements this time – So thats exactly what we'll be dealing with. At a secret meeting in the batcave, officials at BYOND discussed how to implement achievements and what they could do for the games and community.

Achievements 101

For starters, what is an achievement anyway? In this case, we mean a sort of virtual badge. A reward in the form of prestige, awarded for some sort of action or conquest. Depending on the game and context, this may vary quite a lot. It might be rewarded for completing a quest, for winning a game or for being the top player for a month in a row. It would carry a point reward with it, and presumably all hub entries would have the same total tally of points to award (To keep values somewhat similar).

Achievements are no fun if you can't show them off, however. And for that matter, a game may want to show off things which don't correlate precisely with badges and one-time rewards; a game might want to feature top players and list them by score. We quickly found out that achievements wouldn't be enough for this – We needed to think about score and stat mechanisms too! It would be handy if you could show ladders or graphs of players and how they're doing, as a part of the hub entry. You might want to list the last 5 achievements obtained, along with the top 10 scoring players and maybe a land distribution graph for your game of conquest.

If you could set up all of this rather easily with a few procedure calls from your game and some hub setup foo, how could would that be? How you want to award achievements, what they're called, how many points each one is worth, what icon you want to give each one and whether you want in-game things to be affected by the achievements you award is all up to you. You'll be able to retrieve achievement information on a player from your game, to use as you'd like.

While the nitty-gritty details are still being looked into, thats the gist of it. Furthermore, other games would also be able to see what achievements a player has gotten in your game – Potentially giving you exposure, or allowing you to create sequel games that draw on past achievements. How the achievements are visible and how all of this ties into the hub and programming language is still being discussed, we promise we'll keep you updated as things go along.

If things go well with achievements, we'll look into implementing them on a more global scale further down the road. Until then, we're really interested in what you think about all of this. Would you foresee using this in your game? Have you thought of a cool achievement idea that this doesn't seem to cover? Or just want to comment on your opinion? Go go!

As a last mention, Tiberath posted his first DevTalk article called DevTalk: Game Frameworks - On why splitting up your game into core engine and content might be a good idea! Next week, DevTalk features a guest article by Lummox JR on improving your NPC AI by thinking about sight, sound, smell and more.

Very cool. Efencea may need to implement some achievements when they're ready.
Incredible. I can't wait at all, this is going to change everything.
Accchiiieevvveeemmeeennttsss. :)
This is definitely a great idea for games with no long term rewards that want to include them (non-RPGs to be specific).
I can't wait until this gets implemented.
Very good Idea, that's one thing Byond defiantly needs.
This could be a nice element for strategy games, as if that hasn't been mentioned, but still. 'x' beat 'game' on very really omgwtf hard difficulty! It can increase publicity for a game too, I suppose.
This would be a great idea, what would be even better is if people have recieved these achievements have a way of displaying them on their sites or even devise a system to add them as forum signatures. I may be looking to far ahead at this stage but the idea opens a whole load of possibilities.
Btw the link to the DevTalk Article isn't working
Charmed_Forever wrote:
Btw the link to the DevTalk Article isn't working

Works fine for me?
Alathon wrote:
Charmed_Forever wrote:
Btw the link to the DevTalk Article isn't working

Works fine for me?

My guess is master Tom had already fixed it. =)
I love achievements on X-Box 360 and i think it adds more purpose to playing a game. It would be really cool on byond too, the thing is, as an achievement hunter i have seen games vary so much in how difficult they are to obtain, example = Dead Rising has an acheivement that requires u to play 14 hours straight without turning off ur xbox while surviving attacks from zombies and psychopaths while making sure u have enuff food to live for a measely 20g. And on the Avatar Burning Earth game u can get all 1000g in the first level tutorial by spamming the Y button. I guess games like that on byond wont be taken as seriously, but i also think making them too hard is lame aswell
Theres an important distinction here. Since its much easier to create a hub entry and associated game rewarding points than it is to release a game for the Xbox, the points really can't matter outside the scope of an individual game.

The only feasible way to make points matter is to take control away from developers, to prevent inflation; and thats whats being alluded to with a more global-scale set of Achievements, which aren't related to an individual game per se.
Alathon wrote:
Theres an important distinction here. Since its much easier to create a hub entry and associated game rewarding points than it is to release a game for the Xbox, the points really can't matter outside the scope of an individual game.

The only feasible way to make points matter is to take control away from developers, to prevent inflation; and thats whats being alluded to with a more global-scale set of Achievements, which aren't related to an individual game per se.

Or maybe only BYOND Favorite games can officially give out Achievements?.. I don't know. Distingushing rip from non-rip for thousands of games would obviously be far too difficult.
LevelUp wrote:
I love achievements on X-Box 360 and i think it adds more purpose to playing a game. It would be really cool on byond too, the thing is, as an achievement hunter i have seen games vary so much in how difficult they are to obtain, example = Dead Rising has an acheivement that requires u to play 14 hours straight without turning off ur xbox while surviving attacks from zombies and psychopaths while making sure u have enuff food to live for a measely 20g. And on the Avatar Burning Earth game u can get all 1000g in the first level tutorial by spamming the Y button. I guess games like that on byond wont be taken as seriously, but i also think making them too hard is lame aswel...



Dont forget the Achievment where you gotta Kill the tank by hand to hand combat ! ...or Survive without any survivors being Knocked down....

Without reading the other posts, I like the idea. In my Tower Defense clone, I would like to give out badges for each difficulty level completed. There would be unique badges for earning a spot on the top 10. A special badge for getting the #1 spot. I would essentially approach it like the LIVE badge system on xbox.

ts
A built-in achievement system would be great. The system I had been working on is a bit messy, it would be nice to have some hub support.
A global achievement system (XBox Live clone, gain points from playing various games) probably wouldn't be a good idea, unless there was a strict moderation on what games can give points, and how...