I do believe that your game will only support achievements when you (or if) you contracted by Microsoft to add your game to XBLA Marketplace. And achievements may not even be implementable at this point. I'm guessing we'll have to wait until XNA 3.0 is released, since that's when this Peer Review thing comes out.

Why dont they just put a achievements list on your gamercard, but excluded from the normal achievements. You know, jsut something to be seen on the game's launch menu (the menu that gives you the option to play a game, download content for it, delete it ect).

Bapa:

I do believe that your game will only support achievements when you (or if) you contracted by Microsoft to add your game to XBLA Marketplace. And achievements may not even be implementable at this point. I'm guessing we'll have to wait until XNA 3.0 is released, since that's when this Peer Review thing comes out.

If you have a publishing agreement and are an official XBLA release then achievements are totally possible for all games including XNA Framework games. The XNA XBLA extensions that were talked about at GDC handle this and other Live features. Extensions are only available for officially published games.

If you publish through the yet to be released Xbox Community games portal then achievements are not available and no matter how long this thread drags on its not going to change any time soon ;-)

MattHenleyXNA:

I would rather give the player an unlockable such as new characters or weapons when they accomplish. People say achievments give a game more replayability, wouldn't getting a brand new weapon, better than the last make you want to play some more?

That's the best point I've seen yet in this thread.  Achievements are cool, I like getting them in my retail games, but I just don't feel a need for them in XNA games.

Getting a poking stick in Little Gamers, on the other hand... that's cool!  ;-)

Tom

Sure it's a tricky problem but it is a problem. Simply not considering it helps nobody. It comes down to this: if MS wants to charge us to download these games then they are retail. Pure and simple. If my MS points get deducted then i've paid for the game.

Achievements would be a very big factor in replay value from the kind of casual games XNA devs are most likely to build. Most games won't have storylines so incentive to continue playing would be greatly increased by working toward well designed achievments.

Not having it devalues the entire XNA Community platform.

CodeMunky:

Sure it's a tricky problem but it is a problem. Simply not considering it helps nobody. It comes down to this: if MS wants to charge us to download these games then they are retail. Pure and simple. If my MS points get deducted then i've paid for the game.

Achievements would be a very big factor in replay value from the kind of casual games XNA devs are most likely to build. Most games won't have storylines so incentive to continue playing would be greatly increased by working toward well designed achievments.

Not having it devalues the entire XNA Community platform.

Sure, but adding it detracts from those companies shelling out $X,000 dollars for dev kits, even more for large teams, and then a bunch on publishing and marketing. If Microsoft alienates them, it wouldn't be very good for business. Who would you rather upset? The three guys in a basement making games or EA? Sure some consumers will feel devalued, but that's why these games are separated from the XBLA games. Users will (should) know going into this section that there are no achievements.

CodeMunky... please read through this whole thread and understand WHY community games cannot do acheivements. Without a code review and certification pass you cannot be assured that the game will not maliciously award acheivements and that will make a mockery of the whole system. Community games can never have that kind of reivew process becuase it simply costs too much. The microsoft guys have totally considered this.... right now there is no easy/cheap/practical solution to the problem so as I have asked several times... if you can come up with a way of ensuring that a community game behaves without costing a fortune then let us all know.

CodeMunky:

It comes down to this: if MS wants to charge us to download these games then they are retail. Pure and simple. If my MS points get deducted then i've paid for the game. 

Who said MS is going to charge you for XNA Community games?

CodeMunky:

Not having it devalues the entire XNA Community platform. 

That's your opinion and you're entitled to it. My opinion is that just being able to get my game on the 360 as an indie shows how much MS values the community. You're welcome to try to get your games on the PS3 or Wii. ;) :D

CodeMunky:

Not having it devalues the entire XNA Community platform.

Having it devalues achievements and gamerscore.

Andy Patrick:

CodeMunky:

Not having it devalues the entire XNA Community platform.

Having it devalues achievements and gamerscore.

Agreed.

Sorry to change the 'direction' of this thread, but I have my own opinion and a suggestion.

Achievements [to me] are more about my personal achievements than something to use as bragging rights. To be honest, though, I dont own an XBox [yet] and I'm not 100% sure how achievements affect anything else. Still, all the PC games I've played with achievements (Portal, Team Fortress 2, etc) have posed new challenges to me within the existing realm of the game, and therefore add a certain amount of 'replayability' - even if its just for my own satisfaction.

So, what is stopping you from adding achievements to your game? Sure, you cant add 'official' achievements to your game, but you can definately put your own system in place, storing each user's personal achievements on disk between plays. Even if you [read: your players] dont get anything else by obtaining these achievements - it still adds value to your game. Doesnt it?

I know lots of people around here have talked about adding in-game achievements. It's something I plan to add to my game as well. I agree too. Achievements to me are a personal challenge. Like in Crackdown, collecting all 500 agility orbs. That took months of hard work. And now I have to do the rest. It really keeps me playing that game to have all the achievements it does.

So definitely implement in-game achievements. I think it will still add the goal aspect without detracting from the value of the official achievements and gamerscore.

DrDeth:

Achievements [to me] are more about my personal achievements than something to use as bragging rights

....

So, what is stopping you from adding achievements to your game? Sure, you cant add 'official' achievements to your game, but you can definately put your own system in place, storing each user's personal achievements on disk between plays. Even if you [read: your players] dont get anything else by obtaining these achievements - it still adds value to your game. Doesnt it?

I agree with this. It's a shame that we can't have real achievements, but there's nothing to stop you putting your own achievement system in your game, and it does add replay value to the game when the game gives you recognition for something that would otherwise have been ignored.

The only downside is that other players won't be able to see what achievements you have. Although, you could partially get around this by sending this data to other players that you're playing with, during a network game, and maybe keep a cache of the achievements of the last 20 players you played with, or something like that.

Another achievement replacement would be rewarding players with extra content (I think this was already suggested in the thread, but I'll reiterate). So instead of just saying "good job on this level, here's an in-game achievement" it could be "good job on this level, here's a sweet new weapon/level/item/etc". Then there's a real drive to do well. Especially with the levels thing. Extra levels mean more gameplay so players will keep trying to unlock that level. You could have a whole chain of unlockable levels. For instance you unlock the first one in a normal level. This bonus level is totally unrelated to the rest of the game. Then it's like arcade mode in the bonus level. You just try to get to some requirement to get the next bonus level. Rinse and repeat. It's like having two games in one at that point.

Just throwing out ideas. There are lots of ways to encourage the gamer to keep playing and reward them.

The Oid:

The only downside is that other players won't be able to see what achievements you have.

Only on the 360. On the PC it would be easy to set up something to allow other people to see your achievements. :)

Zman - Please read my initial post which explains in some detail just how much i understand why it's a problem.

 

Machaira:

Who said MS is going to charge you for XNA Community games?

 

It's an assumption based on the talk about revenue share. Having revenue to share with the developers implies that the games will be charged. If they don't then it's no issue :)

CodeMunky:

Machaira:

Who said MS is going to charge you for XNA Community games?

It's an assumption based on the talk about revenue share. Having revenue to share with the developers implies that the games will be charged. If they don't then it's no issue :)

I believe that was a discussion about the option of revenue share. From the team blog:

Most of you are now probably asking, “Can I make money off of this?”  Well, the answer is “Yes!”.  While we don’t have all the specific details (the lawyers are huddled in the corner, making serious faces and muttering incomprehensibly, so we have to wait for their final word), we can at least tell you a few juicy tidbits:
1)       We will offer different revenue sharing models to let you sell (or give away) your game.  We will announce more complete details on this prior to the retail consumer launch this holiday season.
2)       You will be able to self-rate your game with a provisional rating, subject to agreement of the peer reviewers that look at your game before you publish it
3)       Microsoft retains the right to remove your game from the Xbox LIVE community games should you violate the Terms of Service in any way
4)       Achievements, Gamerscore, and Leaderboard features will not be available.  Those features are reserved for games published on Xbox LIVE Arcade.

It's also worth noting right there that they specifically state Achievements will not be available and are reserved for XBLA titles. So as much as we all could argue about the possibility, it's pretty clear that isn't happening.


[edit: stupid forum software keeps messing up my formatting]

Nick Gravelyn:

CodeCube:

Is this something you can only do with a publishing contract?

probably

I hope that they make Achievements fair game to everyone, but only allow games with publishing contracts to give Gamer Points. Then it's fun for people playing the games, fun for people making the games, and still fair to people who don't play them (since all the achievements are 0 points).

 But I do hope they announce more on these plans soon.
 

Well you could technically make your own simple achievement system and reward players without the achievements actually showing up on their gamer card. That's how the Orange Box on PC does it, they have the same achievements and acheivement system as the console version, you just don't get gamerscore for them.

Hazardous101:

Nick Gravelyn:

CodeCube:

Is this something you can only do with a publishing contract?

probably

I hope that they make Achievements fair game to everyone, but only allow games with publishing contracts to give Gamer Points. Then it's fun for people playing the games, fun for people making the games, and still fair to people who don't play them (since all the achievements are 0 points).

 But I do hope they announce more on these plans soon.
 

Well you could technically make your own simple achievement system and reward players without the achievements actually showing up on their gamer card. That's how the Orange Box on PC does it, they have the same achievements and acheivement system as the console version, you just don't get gamerscore for them.

I just brought something like that up earlier.

Shawn Hargreaves:

SimReality:

 They can impose the same limit on the number of achiements as they do for arcade games. Plus, who cares if somebody gets 10,000 achievements if they are all 0 points?

For instance:

What if I make a game that just immediately gives 10,000 achievements to the person playing it? What if I also put obscenities in the description of these achievements? I distribute this game, and everyone who is fooled into running it gets their gamertag spammed with all this junk. Now not only can they no longer find the achievements from the real games that they want to play (they'd be buried down the bottom of a ridiculously long list) but whenever they go to play some other game, people will be sending negative feedback about them because of the obscenities that appear in their gamercard. Not exactly a great experience, and not at all what Live is supposed to be about!

That's just one example: there are many more such.

This is not to say that zero point achievements aren't interesting, but it is far from obvious how these could be made to work in a safe and secure way.

I would think Microsoft would implement a way to force games released by XNA with achievements to fall in the standards they make. Just as now retail games are forced to give 1,000 points per game…I am sure there would have to be as I would think if not even coders would have been tempted to add secret achievements and GS points.

 

It could be something as simple as the framework keeping track of how many times a game calls up the Achievement method, and wont let it get passed x amount. For your example above that would solve that.

 

As well as I am sure the game will see many sets of eyes before it would hit the DLC…so I would think/hope games that try to destroy a users gamerscore would never even make it to become DLC

 

 

Paul:

I would think Microsoft would implement a way to force games released by XNA with achievements to fall in the standards they make.

Yes. They will. That standard being "no achievements, no gamer score."

Very simple. Not going to change. Get over it.

Gamerpoints are a little unbalanced anyway. I finished Gears of War with a total of about 50 gamerpoints...

I think the problem is not XNA; I think the problem is the fact that "community" games are not under the same contract as publisher games. If you are published, retail or XBLA, then you will get achievements and gamerpoints through a secondary library that MS can give you. If you are a community game, you won't.

You can already do "achievements" for single player, by just storing the unlocks in the savegame data, but those won't be networked, so you don't get the competition aspect (other than competing with yourself).

Now, if we had online scores for XNA, we could do our own achievements. Assume that each game got to associate an integer score with each of a number of game modes, tied to the game key (GUID) and the gamer ID. Just encode each achievement as a bit in a 32-bit score value, in some game mode that you don't actually support regular play in :-) That way, in your leaderboard browser, you could view these "achievements" in the game UI.

jwatte:

Gamerpoints are a little unbalanced anyway. I finished Gears of War with a total of about 50 gamerpoints...

I hated how Gears of War gave out it's gamerscore. The 10,000 kill achievement with no real working system that tracks kills?  

jwatte:

I think the problem is not XNA; I think the problem is the fact that "community" games are not under the same contract as publisher games. If you are published, retail or XBLA, then you will get achievements and gamerpoints through a secondary library that MS can give you. If you are a community game, you won't.

Yeah I can understand this.

I think Microsoft should give 50gs points under the community games contract…but not to the player…to the developer.

How cool would be it so see

 

Achievement Unlocked: Developed your first game  ;)

 

Achievement Unlocked: Developed your first game  ;)

I'm ALL for that!

And, by the way, the XNA launcher does not achieve tech cert, because it doesn't give achievements or gamerpoints. I'm just sayin'!