Achievements and the grind

Bit of news – Steam achievements are in.

The ones added are about 1/2 to 3/4 of “story” based achievements. So fairly basic ones that you’d expect to unlock just by playing the game. Because the game has some challenging missions I hope that these can be a sense of pride for the player and add a bit extra satisfaction to conquering a goal. There are also a few achievements obtained when straying from the path of the main story and doing somewhat unusual things. I hope to add to these story based achievements in the near future and as the story portion of the game gets completed.

 

So the truth is that I didn’t give achievements much thought up until recently. My own personal experience with achievements is mostly take it or leave it situation, but as a developer I have to try to maximize their potential value.

 

So brainstorming on achievements and their value:

  • Cool art work for player’s to enjoy
  • Clever name/description of achievement
  • Cool art/clever description to entice a potential player
  • Passing a particularly hard stage
  • Displaying on Steam profile page
  • Marketing aspect of friend seeing a unlocked achivement
  • Completing 100% of the game
  • Statistics and game info – N% of players unlocked achievement ABC

So clearly achievements can have a lot of value. I hope to take advantage of them and to use them to boost player enjoyment of the game.

 

The other happenings are the new story content. It is going well – but I’m feeling the grind. In working on new story content I tend to replay a mission over and over. In this particular stage changing earlier enemy attacks, or happenings in the mission can have big consequences on later missions. So I often need to replay the mission from the beginning, this is wearing me down a bit. It is strange because I think that for the player this will be one of the more exciting missions, tons of combat, building defenses, swarms of enemies and the ups and downs of battle. I hope that it turns out that way.

The grind however – doesn’t impact me when tweaking/adding new features and bug fixing. A very good sign, I often think of the future of Void Destroyer – whatever shape it takes – and constantly adding new features towards a sandbox type game. Oh to dream :)