When I was working on Condado last year, I started building an Achievement framework into the game (as well as a couple of achievements). However, I never ended up releasing this functionality because of a silly thing – I didn’t have the chops to draw achievement icons or badges to match each achievement! So that functionality was shelved until I could procure some graphics.

I like the idea of achievements, maybe because I’ve been trying to unlock achievements on my XBOX360 for every game I owned; but if I think about it from a design point of view it makes a lot of sense. Achievements help to:

1. Encourage users to explore and try new areas which they may ignore (because it’s a more difficult concept/strategy, it wasn’t described in the help/tutorial, or because they don’t have any other incentive to)
2. Provide additional goals to work towards once the game has been completed or mastered. I think this is particular important for a game which doesn’t have a story.
3. An opportunity for some puns or fun

For Condado, I wanted to add some achievements where the user would have to think and learn about card combinations, and enter into some more uncommon scenarios. But of course, I could think about it all I wanted yet I couldn’t implement it because I didn’t have any graphics!

Then I realized that I don’t really have to have specific icons. I could just give generic rewards. So I broke up the achievements into difficulty. Easy are the ones that reward the user for learning the game, Medium are the ones which are a bit fun, and Hard are the ones for specific scenarios; and just assigned them to bronze, silver, and gold stars. Here’s what it looks like to receive an achievement:

I also like the idea of knowing that there are secret achievements, but not knowing exactly how to obtain it. I can’t make all the achievements like this because then the user might get discouraged; but I added a couple of secret achievements, with appropriately leading titles, just to spice things up. These are the most enjoyable achievements to make, and here are a couple I like:

Posted by Kevin in Blogs Tags: android, appdev, condado