Achievement system in your games for retaining players

Transcription

 Welcome to another episode of the UIBuzz podcast. I’m your host as always Peter Witham. You can find myself in this podcast. At Peter Witham dot com. This episode, I’m going to follow on a little bit from a previous episode. Back in episode 58, I talked about adding a leaderboard to your games. And why I thought that was important and the benefits of doing that well in this one, I want to follow up on that because I’ve now shipped my, endless hurdles game update on iOS. We’re the leaderboard in there using game center. Which is what I discussed in that episode. And now I’m turning my attention to achievements.

And I want to talk about those and why I think they’re important.

First of all, let’s talk about what an achievement system is now. The idea here is I’m sure you’ve seen this. It’s very popular on steam, for example. Where you have a series of achievements goals, if you’re like in your game. That the player works towards, maybe they get a reward for it, or maybe they just get the recognition for doing it.

So for example, Let’s say you are doing a game and it’s got some fruit in it and you clicked a hundred apples, right? There may be an achievement for collecting a hundred apples, and maybe you get something for that in return. Or maybe you just get the badge that says, you’ve reached this achievement, kind of thing on steam by you see, you have achieved. 13 of 60 achievements, something like that.

Right. I’m sure you’ve seen this, but that’s the basic idea behind that. Now it’s actually pretty straightforward to implement that on most platforms. At least the ones that I’m familiar with, there’s not a lot of code involved, which is great. And some of them even provide you. Built in screens where it takes care of all the fancy looking details and nice UI for you as well. And all you have to do is update the values for each of those achievements. Now, why would you want to do this?

I think again, it’s another thing that keeps players engaged and gives them something to work towards. Now in my case, for example, on my endless hurdles game. The idea behind the game is it’s an endless runner, right? And so therefore. The user. Is pretty much doing, I don’t want to say the same thing all the time, but very much similar things all the time. And the way to extend the game here and their interest in playing it for longer and to keep coming back. Is to add these achievements.

So for example, I’m looking along the lines of, they jump 100 hurdles, then they jump a total of a thousand hurdles, 5,000, those kinds of things. That they have to work towards. Over time. So it keeps the player coming back. And trying to perform and achieve those achievements. So that, in this case they can brag to their friends, but it also shows in the iOS game center that they’ve achieved these achievements and how many they have left, or whether they’ve achieved them all and progression and those kinds of things. But the idea is it’s about engagement and engagement over time.

And I think that that is a, a great way to extend your game with very little effort from the development side. You’re not looking at adding new features or new twists or all of those kinds of things. You’re really taking advantage of the content that you already have in your game. Another example may be, events, right?

So in my game, At the end is hurdle’s game. There is a Christmas event and a Halloween event right now. I’m working on a lot more. But the idea being that, Hey, when they play those events, which are only available at certain times of year, They get the achievement for that. So for example, Halloween, right?

You can only play during Halloween unless you’ve unlocked it already. And therefore they had to come back at that period of time. So it may be that they have no intention of playing the game that much between now. And now is February as of recording this. And, and Halloween time, but maybe they’ll come back and handling and play the event.

Thank you. Get the idea there and things like that. So, The suggestion really is here. Go away and think about these things. I am certain whatever your game is, regardless of type and content and everything else, there is a way that you can tie and an achievement system into it. And make that work for you.

And it also gives you something. To put in the marketing and the advertising on and on the app stores. And like I say, it’s another one of those friendly competitions between players and everybody else. Because, especially if you combine that with a leaderboard, but I want to put that out there in this short episode for you to think about it, because I’m finding this a very simple system to work towards integrating and are very attractive.

One at that. I’m, I’ve been beta testing it myself. And I find myself playing my own game even more than I already do to try and get these achievements, not only for a testing perspective, but it really appeals to those completionist gamers out there as well. Right. So, if you have any thoughts on this, I’d love to hear about them.

Reach out to me @UIBuzz on X. Or go to PeterWitham.com/contact. If you want to come on the podcast and talk about this as well, or anything else, game and app development related. You are more than welcome. I’m always looking to have folks come on and share their opinions and have some great discussion. So you can find me. PeterWitham.com/contact. Reach out to me there and say, Hey, I want to come on and talk about whatever the topic is.

That’s it folks. I hope you’re having a great start to the year. Mine’s going really well. I’ve shipped lots of updates. I got lots more planned and I’m working on my first 3d game as well, along with my project hack idle game. But that’s it for now, folks, I will speak to you in the next one.