Designing Achievements for McDROID - want your input

While I've noticed the game before, I don't know much about the gameplay. But with those mechs I've seen, are they customised? If so, maybe making a ridiculously unsuitable mech (can't balance, weight over what the legs support, something like that) should have one ding.

I wanted to make a suggestion about playing it for like 5 hours and it saying congrats on putting real play time in vs just playing for cards!

You're right that the descriptions aren't very clear, so I'd need a community guide to complete them. On a general note, I love a game that lets me earn all the achievements without a lot of grinding.

No multiplayer level grinding please. So many games use those types of achievements in an attempt to get players to play their multiplayer more.

you have a very colorful game - why don't you try to make the archiments colorful too?

Make the "achieved" icons colored in, the game isn't black and white. Also, based on what I'm seeing, the game has a very "outlined" visual style, so adding that to the achievement icons might make it look more like the game and less like generic confusing icons. Also, perhaps editing the descriptions might be useful. Right now it assumes you've already completed it, which might be confusing (example "You did this and this! Now this!"). It might make more sense to say what the achievement is (example "Do this, kill this, complete this many whatevers, grind this many points").

Kinda off topic, but wasn't this the game you could get for free a while ago in their store when the whole SimCity fiasco happened?

The icons need more colors ... and more strawberries :3

Seriously, so far I'd say they do not match the nice comic style of the game at all.

And I can't even associate any of the "turrets" in the icons with actual ingame turrets, they look more like chess pieces.

So far I mostly see achievements that are related to turrets or strawberries - what about "You have defeated X enemies of type Y"? (just don't make them too grindy)

Just my 2 cents =)

Keep up the good work and I hope I can enjoy McDROID on Steam soon :D

No.

lol

(Some very good ideas are up^^, you may want to check them out.)

I think the best thing is to avoid really hard achievements, some of the Super Meat Boy ones are almost impossible and only few people would do them

for me description is a little too lengthy but they looks nice

It's unanimous, more colors!

What about something like Cooking by the Book in Hate plus?

Well I personally loved all of the achievements in dejobann games like AaaaAaAAAaaAa, just because when I achieved one of them, I loved reading what it was called. Normally I don't go out of my way to do achievements, but in those games, I actually enjoyed collecting them just so I could say stuff like "I have jumped beyond the power of 2 and lived to tell the tale" and back it up.

The achieved icons look like they're... unachachived. Gray doesn't work well I guess.

I'd say to add some color to the ones that are grey colored for achieved. People tend to associated greyed out as being locked still since that is what most games do. Either that or make the locked more obvious, like put a chain or X over the picture.

As far as what you what achievements to be for, the ideal tends to be a mix of storyline and challenges. People like earning achievements as they progress through the game normally and it lets them share how far they've gotten with others. A good and challenging game will have no more than half of the achievements be storyline related. Then you want to do some stuff that is actual challenges and missable stuff. Optional bosses, sidquests to get extra stuff, and things like that are good.

Thing to avoid are achievements that are downright tedious. A good example of a truly tedious achievement is the 10,000 Kills one in Final Fantasy VIII. People have calculated that at the fastest that achievement will take 80 hours after you've already earned the rest that take around 60 hours. Don't do that sort of achievement because it's not fun for players and just gets people wanting to cheat it (in fact there's even a guide that provides a macro to auto kill monsters for that one, people also have posted how to hack your save for it).

In the end, you know your game the best. Consider what you would find fun to play and what sort of things you want players to discover. Achievements can be a great way to get players to try out challenges they may not have normally tried and to do stuff they would have missed.

My personal favorite set of achievements was for Ys II. There's a few that you'll get from playing and beating the game, but a good number are random silly easter eggs and missables. Yeah, someone would need a guide to find all of them, but there was nothing in there that I felt was tedious and didn't add in some way to my overall experience of the game. In fact a few of them had me busting out laughing and players had fun posting screencaps of the scenes. That and nearly a year later I still remember the fun I had, so that also says a lot.

McSteroids - Make your droid look like a hulking monster.

Not sure how flexible the customization will be but hopefully you can do something like this.

While I prefer a focus on skill and not on pointless grinds, I'm generally ok with any kind of in-game achievements as long as they are always obtainable - however, the 'play for 24 hours straight' one is a bad idea I think, as what it really means to anyone is 'leave the game idle for 24 hours straight', which is hardly an achievement, and not all players are going to have the option to do that. If you do implement such an achievement, make it cheatable (ie. adjusting system clock).

Achievements which rely on developer intervention, social networking, active multiplayer servers, or other similar features should be treated with care, or avoided altogether. This doesn't mean don't use them at all - such things can be fun when done right - but my recommendation for such achievements is to make them also achievable in an alternative way. While I don't particularly like achievement culture in the first place, it is an unfortunate part of modern gaming and in many games, getting 100% of the achievements is often regarded as part of truly completing a game, so it's best to avoid any situation which means that future buyers may be unable to complete the game.

• Yeah I think the Facebook one is really unnecessary, and the 24 hours straight one - I've never played a game 24 hours straight even the games I idled/ games I absolutely adore, you'll just see people idling them which doesn't reflect well on the game time counter well at all!

• If you wanted to make it seem like people are spending a lot of time on the game, this wouldn't be a good way - would possibly have the opposite effect because even if I really played many hours my friends would probably just be like "Oh they probably idled most of that for the achievement"