I have to start with a confession: I’m an achievement addict. To give a mere example, I bought Torchlight 1 when it came out on Runic’s website, then bought it again on Steam just for the sake of achievement hunting.
And, as being an indie dev gives a great degree of freedom to make the game into something I’d love to play as a player too (in other words: if you can’t find the game you’ve been always dreaming of, become an indie and make it yourself 🙂 ) , when it comes to achievements, I want Chasing Shadows to have much, much more than a regular list of a few dozen achis.
From a developer’s perspective, achievements are also a great tool that can reward the player during the very start of the game when the basic rules are learned in an unknown and possibly confusing environment (for newcomers to the GC series), and in the late game they can give a temptation to find new ways to play the game and explore game content that would otherwise have been left hidden, thus opening the way towards having a much richer gaming experience, enjoying the game to its fullest.
So, what will we have in GC2:CS?
The old amulets are now called achievements (to avoid confusion with the newly added talismans system), but their role is the same, they can be earned by completing various tasks.
Achievements are sorted into decks, each deck giving several bonuses (from skill points to revealed secret levels) when all the achievements are earned.
3×3 achievements can be pursued at a time (3 open decks, 3 achis open per deck). This helps to focus on the open achis instead of trying to get them at the same time, and also makes the game run a bit faster (no need to regularly check all the achievements’ requirements every time you kill a monster)
There are 4 new buttons in the battle frame: achievements, talismans, skills, and stats. These each open up a panel where you can check your status, e.g. what achievements are available and how is your progress.
Behind the scenes: Instead of hand drawing all the achi icons, I’ve written a script-fed drawing module that works similarly to the ground texture builder, putting the achi icons together using various textures, masking, effects (blur, glow…), and a set of tiny images. (Please note that the achi icons shown in the screenshot are just quick results of playing around with the icon drawing engine, the final icons will look more polished and will make more sense.)
There will be lots of achievements in the release, and as it’s easy to add more and (I think) fun to collect them all, I’ll surely add more in later updates.
Coming up next:
4th of February:
Spells update
18th of February:
Shadows + GCL is 2 years old
