Looking for suggestions for Steam Achievements for a Sokoban style puzzle game. I never really pay attention to achievements so I’m not super up on what gets people excited about them. I’ve asked a few people for suggestions and built a list. Looking for feedback on what people would consider decent achievements for this sort of puzzle game.
I’ve attached a poll to this thread for people to vote on some of the suggestions but number of options is limited. You can vote as many times as you like.
I’ve attached the full list of suggestions so far at the bottom of this article. It appears that most people prefer achievements that involve doing interesting things, which makes sense, though some people seemed to like the idea of “funny fail” achievements, ie, X number of Restarts. I’m not sure how specific that is to just them, though, hence looking to gauge what more people think.
It’s worth noting that the game already contains local high scores / best scores for beating a level in less moves than you did previously, so making achievements based off that is easy and fits with the game.
If you have suggestions for other achievements, please mention them.
Suggestions so far:
Beat the tutorial
Beat your first puzzle
Beat World 1
Beat World 2
Beat Original Puzzles
Beat Original Mirror
Beat Christmas
Beat Christmas Mirror
Walk X steps
Beat Level X in Y moves
Beat level X with NO Undo (might pick multiple levels)
No Undo tiers (gold, silver, bronze for different level groups)
To me it seems silly to award an achievement for using the settings menu. I know some games have joke achievements but even those are rewarding something- like the player being curious or trying to break the game. Why would using the settings menu be an achievement?
Why not. Maybe just for fun
We could equally ask, why anyone need achievements?
But yet some will try to get 100% of them, even game is long time finished, hoping to something interesting, or just share with others.
I think after careful consideration, and listening to all of the suggestions (most of the initial list was other people’s suggestions), I’m going to keep it simple:
Completionist
Beat the tutorial
Beat your first puzzle
Beat World 1
Beat World 2
Beat Original Puzzles
Beat Original Mirror
Beat Christmas
Beat Christmas Mirror
Counting
Walk 3000 steps
Beat 10 puzzles
Beat 20 puzzles
Beat 30 puzzles
Beat 50 puzzles
Beat 80 puzzles
Beat 100 puzzles
Highscores
Beat Level X in Y moves (and do a series of them)
That gives some achievements that everyone will get just for playing through, and those that want a challenge can try and do the Highscores ones. I know some people initially suggested “joke” achievements, and some random stuff like doing something in the menus ie checking the credits, but I’m not sure I see the point of those ones myself.
I liked the idea of “No Undo” ones, but then I realised, if you accidentally move 2 spaces and box yourself in or something, you’ve stuffed the whole puzzle up and need to start again, which would be really annoying and not of real benefit. I think the highscores are more interesting personally.
Earlier I said that using the settings menu would not really be an achievement. but I think looking at the credits totally works because in that case you are “rewarding” the player’s wanting to acknowledge the developers.
True, but surely the no-undo ones are for people who are pretty familiar with the puzzles already? The challenge is less about figuring it out and more about holding the whole thing in your head from the start.
You can restart your game really quickly, I don’t recall making any input mistakes when I played it, I don’t recall any of the levels having a huge number of moves once you’d figured out a solution, and challenging achievements are surely for your enthusiast-level players. So I don’t think that No Undo achievements are likely to be a problem.
One thought is to have some puzzles with alternate goals for the player to find. But, as the puzzles are already all in that’d be pretty difficult to add in post.
What about a throwaway gag achievement for something stupid, like entering the Konami code at the title screen?
Or maybe an achievement that is so confusing as to how to get it that people struggle to figure out how it’s done and it becomes a thing that people talk about?
like the achievement could be “do the thing” then have it be something like move 10 times on map 1, touch a certain tile, and take over 30 minutes to complete an easy stage.
something that a handful of people might get out of thousands by accident.
And now a bunch of people are racking their brains trying to figure out how to unlock it.
If you are interested, here is the game: