Announcing - Australian Gamer Achievements

News from Matt - Thursday, 13 May 2010 @ 1:09pm

Early last year we were tossing up ideas for April Fools Day, and I came up with the idea of doing Achievements on AG. Silly little things. Click this, read that, etc. The more I thought about it the more taken I was with the concept. I'd never seen it done on a website before. And I knew the work involved in doing it would be significant – no less so for being a one day only joke idea.

I put in a massive amount of time since then, in bits and pieces here and there, but the project has been delayed by a range of other activities, including GameDamage, The Mana Bar, work, life, World of Warcraft, etc. Finally, I'm pleased to be able to release Australian Gamer Achievements on an unsuspecting world. I thought I'd do a quick FAQ on what these achievements are, how they work, and so on.

Why did you do this? It's a stupid idea.
Thanks! I liked the idea and decided to develop it, but it's never taken a high priority because it's just a silly fun idea. As a result the development code for this was tangling with necessary bug fixes, etc, so I decided to get it out the door. For the record it was originally conceived as an April Fools prank for April 2009. So that gives you some idea how long it's been stalled in development.

It took that long to finish?

Who says it's finished? This is a BETA release. Beta release is my way of saying that there's probably a bunch of stuff that doesn't work like it should, and a lot of things will probably cause errors. Some entire achievements turned out to be too difficult and were delaying the entire release, so I decided to delay them. The actual code is pretty good, I'm quite proud of it, but tying this many disparate parts of the site functionality together was a bit hairy. If you have any problems let me know, and just remember it's a beta. Beta.

This is fucked. Nothing lines up right. The popup is borked and I get no sound. There's a weird PHP error messing up the whole site.
See above. Beeeeeeta.

My computer catches fire every time I get an achievement, can you....
Beeeeeeeeta!

Who can use or get achievements?
Anyone with a forum account. You need a forum account to get them, as it's the most logical way to tell people apart and identify them. You not only need an account, but you actually need to be signed in.

Why do you need a forum account?
Did you even read the last question? If you don't have an account on the forum there's no way to tell you apart from anyone else looking at the site. Even if you don't actively participate you need to have the cookie from the forum.

How many achievements are there and where do I see a list?
You can't. Achievements will be re-added as they're fixed, and having it go from 10/32 to 10/34 at random seemed pointless. Oh, those numbers are relatively accurate. It's something like that. 32... or so.

As for seeing the list, that's not possible. In something like a videogame you have to actually do the action once you even know how... for a website knowledge is the whole battle. I want to see people getting achievements as they use the site, not randomly reading 10 reviews to force specific achievements to pop up.

How do I show other people my achievements?
Yeah, if you send them this page they'll see THEIR achievements. There's a permalink at the top that includes your username to specify whose achievements are to be viewed.

What achievements are on the forum?

None. All of the achievements at this point are NOT on the forum. A new batch will be added when... you know... I figure out how to do that.

I have an idea for a new achievement...
I should warn that it's harder to make them than it sounds. Many things that sound viable are simply technically impossible. For a start, there has to actually be an "event". Things like "be a member of the site for longer than a year" have no actual "event" associated with them, so there's no logical point at which to assign the achievement. Other things are simply impossible. It's a nice idea to have it so that if people read the site with a friend they get an achievement, but you'd have to help me out by sending me the javascript for how I tell how many people are in front of your computer.

All this considered, if you have ideas for new achievements, feel free to send them to matt@australiangamer.com.