I am doing a podcast with my friends about games (check out The Adventure Mechanics here) and I decided that I need to try for accountability on actually releasing a game. To that end, I'm going to go through the development process to release a game. Here is the transcript from the thirteenth episode on achievements and putting them into your game:
Welcome to another edition of the adventure mechanics side quest. It's me, Chandler. Today I want to expand on a topic that we got side trackedo n during our Deadbolt episode: Achievements. You know what I'm talking about, the little toast that shows up seemingly randomly while playing a game. The strange ways to play games that the developer thinks that you should do to truly "complete" the game. They seem so straightforward, yet their simplicity belies the massive amount of effort that goes into creating them. Make trivial ones and your game feels like it doesn't take achievements seriously. Make achievements impossible for all but the most talented players and you make your game unapproachable. Let's talk about some of the considerations that go into designing achievements so you don't end up alienating large swaths of your audience and taint their view of your game.
First of all, let's go ahead and actually define what an achievement actually is. Achievements are essentially challenges in the game for bragging rights of some sort. They've been around since at least the Atari era, but they really came into their own when they began getting tracked on the XBox 360. With that, you could really show off what you've done and rub your achievements into the face of that kid that always claims to have beaten every single game you bring up. Ever. Or so I'm assuming. I never actually got into the XBox 360, so my first experience with achievements was through using the PC gaming service, Steam. Whatever the bragging right, achievements getting tracked forces game developers to consider what is worth implementing as an achievement and what is not worth tracking.
As Devon mentioned in our Deadbolt episode, not all achievements are created equal. Some achievements focus on progression, especially for story-driven games. Others will focus on challenges that the player must complete in order to get. They can veer into the absurd and have the player searching for trinkets or other things and find them all. Since achievements don't have to fit into the game's world, they can get the player to do things outside the game as well. For the sake of this talk, I'm going to break achievements into three main categories: Progression achivements, where the player is likely to get them as long as they are playing the game, Challenge achievements, where the player must do something difficult to complete, and Meta achievements, things that aren't necessarily challenges or story progression, but still are ways of interacting with the game.
As we start talking about achievements, let's step back and ask about how often to use them. Ideally, they should be uncommon. They should be a surprise that the player stumbles across while playing the game. If the surprise is too common, they won't really be surprised by them. Tripping over them will make it feel like achievements don't have value to them. Done poorly, it will feel like walking through spider webs; you just can't get away from them and they're always in your way. Don't make your player feel like this. Let's talk about the types of achivements now we know to not use them too much.
Let's start with progression achievements. These are the most straightforward. When the player makes it to a certain beat in the story, they get the achievement. As long as your game is broken into chapters, acts, or whatever, you can tie achievements into these sections. And since achievements are typically tracked, this provides valuable data points from your playerbase. Is everyone making it to the end, or is there a sudden drop in progression achievements after a certain chapter? You can use this data to change the way that area plays or make it easier to progress in some other fashion. You don't necessarily have to change anything, either. It's just valuable information to have to make sure you're both serving your player base and the story you've created.
Next up, we have challenge achievements. These are the achievements that are for the those that love your game so much that they need more of it in some fashion. The story of the game is over, but they can still go through and beat it in a different way, or faster, or whatever. These are a bit harder to implement. They need ot incentivize the player to do something , but they can't be so hard that no one can achieve them. Requiring a world record speed on your game isn't reasonable, but on the other hand, requiring the player to do something trivial isn't reasonable, either. Challenge achievements must be balanced to a difficulty slightly above the average player's capability. Challenge achievements should not end up in tedious fetch quest style missions, however. No one really likes killing the same thing over and over and incentivizing the player to do so with achievements only crystalizes that. Tedium is not fun, no matter what pat on the back there is at the end of it.
Then we have the last category; Meta achievements. These are achivements that aren't like the other two. Defeating a specific character or monster with a comedy weapon, doing something specific on a specific day, or something like watching ads *shudder* can all be meta achievements. The player knows that they're not part of the world and they're doing something arbitrary just for the sake of achievement hunting. These types of achievements are the most challenging to pull off and should be used the most sparingly. You don't want to pull the player out of your game and these types of achievements do exactly that. If you want the player to experience something specific, then put an achievement in for it. You must control the urge to put in a large number of these, though. You can inadvertently make your game another progression path by doing so.
Let's talk about the other part of meta achievements, though. If you need players to watch ads to make money, for the love of whatever diety you choose, do not make it an achievement! This signals to your player that you don't actually care about them. You only care about their eyeballs for money. While this may be true for you, coming out and saying it poisons the well of players before they give you their attention. Another way to alienate your playerbase is to wall off achievements in some way. I'm talking specifically about date specific achievements or one time achievements. If you want your players to do something on specific days, you can. Doing it through achievements is not the way to do so. If you force the player to be online at a specific time (and perhaps only at one opportunity), you're going to annoy players. This shows to your player that either you didn't think out your achievements, or worse, you're an arbitrary and capricious developer. Challenge is fine, but time-limiting something? It's just not worth it. Give players multiple chances to get something, even if it demands they play through again. I guess i'm saying, just don't be mean to your players, as tempting as it may be at times.
So, what's a developer to do with these three types of achievements, besides use them sparingly? Use them to get the player to interact with your game in novel or strange ways. Get the player to be delighted when they come across an achievement. If they've already peeked at the list of achievements, make it a puzzle that they must solve. Make your achievements interesting. Show your players that you respect their time and you want them to play it more. There's a lot of examples of doing achievements well, and even more that are garbage at it. Do they add anything to your game, or are all of the ones you can think of boring and tedious. Unless you plan on releasing to a platform that requires them, consider leaving them out. As with any creative medium, one thing may not fit a given design.
Although I have more to say about achievements, I think this is a good spot to stop for now. As always, if you have any thoughts, comments, or whatever, reach out to me on twitter. My handle is @jcsirron. This has been another adventure mechanics side quest. I'll talk to you next time.
