Storing dates with limited datatypes. Any suggestions?

Unity Engine
1

Hello, I have recently made a list of achievements to add to my game in order to engage users to play more frequently. Most of them are easily detected such as when the user have collected x amount of coins he/she will acquire the “gold digger” achievement etc… However I’m having trouble thinking of a cleaver way to detect another achievement which is acquired if the user plays the game 7 days in a row.

Normally I would add Date.now to an array each time the user logs into the game, I would probably also check if ( dateArray[last] = today ), then not add a new day to prevent duplicate days. This would keep a nice track of which days the user was active, and I could check if the last 7 array dates had no gaps and then unlock the achievement. But since I’m using an external tool to manage persistence across different platforms I have limited options as to which data types are allowed to be persisted, and if fact it doesn’t seem to ship with any kin of collect/lists.

The tool is called CloudOnce and is a very nice google play services integration, and also support apple and amazon cloud thingies.

Here is my options:

I’m scripting in C#. Any suggestions on how to validate the 7 day achievement rules with any of the data types above. (I cannot dynamically generate these persistence variables, they are manually setup in the UI)

2

Storing an array would fail if they logged in mutliple times a day. You really only need to store one time: the time when their streak started. Every time they log in, compare the current date/time to the stored streak. If it’s longer than 7 days, set that as the streak start date. If you need an UI update for “only 3 days to go!” you can calculate that from the current date/time and the start of the streak as well.

If you need to store the data as an integer, convert it to Unix time: Unix time - Wikipedia

3

Good point. And if stored date and current dates’ delta is more than one day, I reset the stored date to current date wich will restart the “days in row” count. Thanks

4

Oops – you’ll need to store the number of days in a row too and reset it to 0 if the span is greater than 24 hours, then log the current date as the last login date. Good catch.

5

Yeah, but 24 hours check won’t do the trick. If a user logs in today 7th October, at 14:00 and then logs in the day after 8th of October at 22:00. That is more that 24 hours apart (32 hours), but still the next day.