Monday Musings #56 – Achievements Philosophy

When I teach design, I often reference Quantic Foundry's Gamer Motivation Model, because it is one of the most concise images I know of. I play tons of games in just as many genres, but Completion is definitely one of my primary motivators. I want to see everything a game has to offer, and fully explore the space.

Naturally that means I have some very strong opinions on what makes a good suite of achievements. Happy Monday! Let's talk about designing achievements for MoteMancer and a couple of fun tidbits from the journey.

Being Thoughtful

My primary philosophy on achievements is they should reinforce the game's core identity, teach as often as possible, and be largely attainable to anyone who actively tries. As a completionist, if I see an achievement that I don't even want to attempt, I will often not care about the rest of the achievements on offer, and will probably check out of the game earlier than I otherwise would have. Things like enforced no-hit runs or speed runs are easy examples that can fall into this category.

That's not to say there's not a time and place for them. If you make a racing game, speed achievements are totally in-line with what the game is about. If your game is already pretty lethal, a no-hit achievement can be very on-brand. But if you have a stealth puzzle game where the core gameplay is patience and planning, a timer is antithetical to the experience. If a platformer is multiple hours long and demands perfection the entire time, that hill may be too high to climb for the vast majority of your players.

I think a significant note is that even without a player facing achievement system, players will still speed run and flex on their own terms. The distinction for me is that those players live in a different space than someone trying to show their love for a game through full completion.

I think one other thing here is worth underscoring. Just because an achievement is easy to implement or seems obvious because other games do it, does not necessarily make it right for a game. Achievements should make the most fun way to play also the way to win.

MoteMancer is primarily about solving puzzles and thoughtfully taking your time while doing so, thus there will not be a time-based canonized achievement. Similarly, there will be no achievement for the Marathon Foundation, nor completely maxing out the difficulty for a run. I do think those are important inclusions for the game as a whole, but that doesn't necessarily mean it's a great achievement experience for a completionist.

The Breakdown

I think of achievements in a handful of categories:

• Play - These are the simple "play the game" achievements, you don't need that many of them, but it's both a way of getting a player's feet wet on the achievement feature itself, and assuring them that they are on the right path. It can vary from game to game, but for a game whose average playthrough is about 100 hours like MoteMancer, some signposting absolutely has value.

• Mastery - I differentiate Challenge from Mastery in that I don't want a player to show me they executed a specific hard maneuver, I want them to demonstrate that they understand how to wield all the tools at their disposal. MoteMancer happens to have a very clean mechanism for this which is Shattering elements (which removes an element entirely from your playthrough) - if you lean too hard on void chests, complete a run where Shadow is removed. I think mastery is just as much about removing crutches as forcing specific use.

• Silly - Life is too short to be serious all the time. Throwing a handful of memes and embracing silly edge cases is just as important as the serious ones. For all those EA testers that discovered you could Levitate and Haste at the same time (nicknamed Levihaste) - I've added an achievement that mimics the behavior for stacking Wind Surfing and Wavedash while Levitating. As a side bonus I can teach new players about the gameplay, and for the veterans, it's a nice wink.

There are some sub-categories too like teaching specific interactions that may be slightly off the beaten path like conducting interplanar warfare with rifts, or growing your own mote patches. In general I try to have about 30% be play the game, 30% exploring the edges of what's possible, and 30% significant obstacles to overcome. The remaining 10% largely depends on the game, and is where things like silly achievements can go or extras that make the other suites feel more complete.

Cultivating Immersion

One of my main design philosophies is that everything in your game should tell the same story. There is a reason MoteMancer is built on hexagons, and has 6 elements, and each crafter makes 6 recipes, and there are 6 action bar buttons on left and right. That level of cohesion is what creates immersion - you feel like you are in a space with its own set of rules, there for you to explore. Some of our players have even suggested that you should craft 6 items with right click instead of 5. Maybe before launch I will find the courage, but 5 is a Very strong number piggybacking for humans, so it's a tough tradeoff.

To that end though, MoteMancer clearly needs 60 or 66 achievements :)

Did you know that as of writing, Satisfactory has exactly 44 achievements and Factorio has exactly 88 achievements? Both are also fully shipped, so odds are they will not change. Clearly the universe is telling me MoteMancer needs 66, and so shall it be.

That's another thing I care deeply about. MoteMancer may add more content in the future, more Foundations etc. But, I will not be changing achievements ever once they are released. Again personal completionist bias, but when a game has a full achievement suite that I 100% complete, and then find out later that a dozen or so were added, it really takes the wind out of my sails. New players get more content, but existing ones get robbed of their accomplishment in some sense.

Once someone has truly 100% completed MoteMancer, I don’t want to move the goalposts on them afterwards.

It's Under 9000?

So I have to share this. MoteMancer is localized in 14 languages, and the achievements will be too. Since I reference plenty of the culture that influenced me - Magic cards, beloved games, TV shows - one of the achievements is naturally titled “It’s Over 9000!”, which you unlock for generating a fairly respectable amount of power.

The funny thing is - in the original Manga and script, the line was "It's over 8000!". I was stunned. Apparently the voice actor just decided to change it in the booth because of the animated mouth movement. It's even 8000 in most of the subbed versions across all languages.

Reflecting on this earth-shattering fact, I was fully prepared to localize and trigger the achievement for different numbers based on the language you were playing from. It's actually not that hard to code and the difference between 8000 and 9000 power is pretty minimal in the grand scheme of things and what the achievement is trying to get you to do.

In the end though, apparently this crazy cultural schism is well known enough in circles that care that it's now a layered inside joke, and 9000 is the accepted meme of choice, so we're sticking with it for all languages :)

Update Soon!

Ok enough rambling for today. The upcoming patch is full of performance optimizations, a new tutorial, Achievements! and a handful of other goodies. But the remaining bugs are not going to fix themselves, and so with that...

Back to the Lab 🌿 ~CyanAvatar