Crystal Towers 2 - Badges

[davidn]

Oh, why am I working on Crystal Towers 2 again. I thought that once I had finished it I would just release it, wait for the reaction and never open it again, like my previous games - but with something this large, it's difficult to just drop it from my life, especially with the facility to watch people's progress in it online.


I haven't been reworking the main game or anything, though - today, I ended up writing a new feature for the site that awards people badges on their account, largely due to kjorteo warning me not to start thinking about what he said too much because it would end with me writing a new feature for the site that awards people badges on their account. The badges are equivalent to achievements, a concept that I had thought up at the very start of writing the game and that I now find myself copying from everybody else instead - though I'm trying my best to try to keep them to actually notable things instead of the supremely patronizing levels to which they can be overdone.

The awarding of all of these badges is just calculated from data that's already there, but they give people a bit of recognition for doing special things like not dying too much, or getting past some accidentally notorious missions that I put in. The shield with a "B" icon is awarded for every level in which you've completed the whole thing - all items, treasure and everything - and haven't died once, and I've actually been quite impressed by its presence at all when browsing around the existing accounts.

I've actually used a few testers' user icons in some of the achievements, for when the random instrument name generator comes up with "the Wolf", "the Rabbit", "the Coyote" or "the Raven" - if you're any of these, you'll know who you are, so if you don't want to be featured for any reason, tell me and I'll remove those. And lupineangel, I used your artwork for the final bonus boss icon without asking - thank you!

No doubt I'll add more as I think of them...

Comments

[ravenworks.livejournal.com]

So, wait - what happens if you 'clear out' a level without dying, and then you go back and die on it while collecting ingredients or something? Do you lose your badge?

Just for the fact that there are badges it's possible not to get (not to mention the "of" ones, which are completely out of the player's hands if I understand correctly?), these are a pretty big departure from normal "achievements"..... which, frankly, I think I approve of! They're actual badges that set you apart, actual achievements, as opposed to just the milestones (or 'brute force' challenges) that people are forced to make for console games... they're fun too, but.. they're more like points on a line, whereas this more celebrates how divergent videogame experiences can be....

And, dude, I am honored to be on one of your badges. X3 (I guessed the URL to make sure I wasn't making assumptions. ;p) Thank you. XD

[davidn]

You're welcome - your thoughts were very valuable, coming as a first-timer to the near-finished beta versions...

Yes, in a game that's sort of... divergent already, with a lot of different paths you can take to go through it, I wanted everyone's collection to be unique in some way. I haven't really done as much as I'd like in that department, as a lot of the badges I've come up with will still inevitably be collected over the course of the game, but I've found some special circumstances and some that are at the mercy of the random generation (such as a rare one for getting more than one instrument of the same "type"). As they only go on the data that's there just now, you can indeed lose a badge for going into a level where you've got everything and dying then... I suppose I could move all these checks to the update script instead and store the existence of the badges in a table, but... aaargh.

[crassadon.livejournal.com]

no one likes to lose a badge :o

[tamakun.livejournal.com]

I saw the badge I had received for two Instruments of Adam, and I realized that's a pretty rare badge ^^

I am continually impressed with the amount of output you've created for this game considering that you're just going on raw data :D -- but then again, that's what you normally work with, right? ^^

[davidn]

I suppose you're right! As if I wasn't distressed enough at how similar my work and spare time activities were :)

[davidn]

Additionally, you'll understand this - it's worrying just how much of the stuff I learn at work is then applied to things in my spare time, and vice versa! Here, that hovering jQuery tooltip is definitely going into the webapp I'm writing at work just now as soon as I get in on Monday, because it's so much better than default browser hover titles...

I knew I was really in trouble when in the Sokobots game, I started thinking of levels as "publishable" when they had been verified completable and had had no changes since then, and had a flag called "hasCompileErrors" on the robots... two terms which were central to what I was doing in our big content management system at the time.

[ravenworks.livejournal.com]

"Worrying" is one way to put it, but... if I can get paid to get practice and research for personal projects out of the way during my work hours, how is that anything but win-win ;)