Maximizing Virality - Achievements Everywhere

One of the biggest challenges that bedroom developers must face when releasing to the world their beloved games is how to spread the word and reach the game's target audience. Even though I'm talking about marketing, this post is targeted for tiny teams or individuals like me, multidisciplinary people with 0 budget, so I'm going to talk about what programming techniques we can use to make our game have more chances to spread viraly: using the achievements and score systems of the gaming platforms.  

Reasons to code external achievements.

It's a fact that for your game to be known, it has to be published in the front page of any big important gaming platform/portal/store. The main problem is that hundreds of games are being published everyday, so it's quite difficult to stand out between the crowd. On one hand, you can reach an agreement with a gaming portal to sponsor your game and the deal make your game to be in the front page for some time, time enough to let know enough people about the game and begin to spread the word. On the other hand, if you don't have sponsor to support you, you have to use other ways to attract the attention of enough people and the webmasters of these portals in a way that it can help your game to be in the front page of the portal. In this case, it helps that you use in your game their systems of scores and achievements, at least, you give a reason to the webmasters to promote your game for the sake of their platforms' social features.

So, next I'm going to tell about the challenges and reasons I faced for the different platforms I decided to support.

You can download the code used for the external achievements in my project Piggies Rescue here.

Web Platforms 

The main reason to choose Flash to develop this game is because the only chances the game has to go viral is through being published in the thousands the web gaming sites around the world. Even though other technologies are getting a piece of the market (Unity, HTML5) they still are too small compared with the Flash dominance.
For the web platforms I choose two community portals like Newgrounds and Kongregate, and a social network, Facebook.

Achievements Newgrounds: 

API: http://www.newgrounds.com/wiki/creator-resources/flash-api

Time to integrate the achievements and score in the game: 1 hour

Code:

// Achievements

API.unlockMedal(“achievementID”);

API.getMedal(“achievementID”);

// Scores

API.postScore(“scoreID”, scoreValue);

API.getScoreBoard("scoreBoardName");

Pros:

Cons:

Achivements Kongregate:

API: http://developers.kongregate.com/docs/api-overview/as3-api

Time to integrate the achievements and score in the game: 2 hours

Code:

// Achievements/Badges

kongregate.stats.submit(“achievementID”, 1);

//Scores

kongregate.stats.submit(“scoreID”, scoreValue);

Pros:

Cons:

Achievements Facebook:

API: https://developers.facebook.com/blog/post/539/

https://code.google.com/p/facebook-actionscript-api/

Time to integrate the achievements and score in the game: 10 hours

Code:

// Scores

var params:Object = {score:scoreValue};

Facebook.api("/me/scores", onScoreSubmitted, params, "POST");

//Achievements

var params:Object = {achievement:”achievementID”};

Facebook.api("/me/achievements", onAchievementSubmitted, params, "POST");

Pros:

Cons:

Mobile Platforms:

On mobile platforms there is no concept of a game going viral, since the contents are totally centralized, it's the companies who own the platforms (Google,Apple,Amazon,Microsoft) the ones who decide who succeed and who fails. Of course, you have the information about the best-sellers, but to be in that list first you have to be exposed to the public time enough to get traction to work, and this first exposure it's decided by the corporations behind these platforms, so a lot of business deals are being made to promote big budget titles, and the rest of the games still have the small chance to be picked up by the webmasters, but it's likely they pick up titles with high productions values than new original ideas. You may think about “Flappy Bird”, or other small budget success, but if you think about the buzz created about these games it didn't come from the mobile platform itself, but from outside the platform.

Achievements Google Play:

API: https://play.google.com/apps/publish/

http://www.milkmangames.com/blog/tools/#gpg

Time to integrate the achievements and score in the game: 2 hours

Code:

// Scores

GoogleGames.games.submitScore(“scoreID”, scoreValue);

GoogleGames.games.showLeaderboard();

//Achievements

GoogleGames.games.showAchievements();

GoogleGames.games.unlockAchievement(“achievementID”);

Pros:

Cons:

Achievements Game Center:

API: https://developer.apple.com/membercenter/index.action

http://www.milkmangames.com/blog/tools/#gpg

http://www.macincloud.com/

Time to integrate the achievements and score in the game: 3 hours

Code:

//Scores

GameCenter.gameCenter.showLeaderboardForCategory(“scoreID”, GCTimeScope.TODAY);

GameCenter.gameCenter.reportScoreForCategory(valueScore, “scoreID”);

//Achievements

GameCenter.gameCenter.showAchievements();

GameCenter.gameCenter.reportAchievement(“achievementID”, 100.0);

Pros:

Cons:

Achievements Amazon:

API: https://developer.amazon.com/home.html

https://github.com/digicrafts/AmazonGameCircle-ANE

Time to integrate the achievements and score in the game: 5 hours

Code:

//Scores

GameCircle.gameCircle.showLeaderboards();

GameCircle.gameCircle.submitScore(“scoreID”,_score);

//Achievements

GameCircle.gameCircle.showAchievements();

GameCircle.gameCircle.submitAchievement(“achievementID”, 100);

Pros:

Cons:

Conclusions

The community based web portals, Newgrounds, Kongregate, are democracies who promote the games they like but they are ruled by an audience of tweens. On the other hand, platforms with more wider audiences, like Facebook or mobile stores, don't have any system for the community to discover new games and promote them, mainly because it will go against the advertisements revenue that the developers should pay to let their games known.

More platforms to explore:

Blackberry: Less crowded store, supports AIR, but you still have to do some of changes to adapt the game, since it's not Android based. So you can have problems with your ANEs. Still I think it's worth to try.

Windows Phone: Another small store, but it doesn't support AIR. If you choose Unity as the development tool, it is a good choice to go.