Achievement system
I hate it when games make me sign in with my google account to offer me the full experience. I hate it even more when apps ask me to login with Facebook to play with my friends, with google to get some perks and with twitter for extra coins.
There are multiple reasons for why you would want to use Google Play Services in your app:
- Leaderboards
- Multiplayer
- Likelihood of the user to spend money
- Achievements
Leaderboards
This was the main drive for me to use the Play Services. Unfortunately, the model of their leaderboards doesn’t really fit with my game model. I needed the power to customize it more and alter it directly, thus I decided to build my own. Another reason for this will be explained in a few short lines.
Multiplayer
For the multiplayer part it would be really nice, but for customization purposes and for the ability to add bots, I will probably use my own implementation over the summer.
Money!
Likelihood for the user to spend money is awesome! It’s incredibly valuable to me, but it doesn’t give anything back to the user so I didn’t want to introduce it as a semi-mandatory step in the app without offering something in return. Probably it will be somewhere in the options menu (semi-hidden) and will offer some extra badges for when you sign up. But that’s it.
Achievements
Now this is the interesting part. From past experience, achievements made my game score double the income from 1st week of implementation. This was a strong drive for me to implement the Play Services now, BUT I was afraid that some users will not get to try the app to it’s full potential if I limit it to only part of them (the double income came with only 33% of users using the achievements system).
For this, I decided to implement my own Achievement system. It will cost a little bit more for me, but hope that i can tweak it enough to be a minimum strain on the server while offering the best possible quality to all the users.
Thus, this is part 1 of the… i don’t know how many parts that will tell the story of my Achievement system.
By the way, for the icons and graphics I asked the amazing Oana from www.OanaDusa.com for some help.
By: Adrian Coman
