Can achievements influence how a player plays a game?
CryRally was a short racing game created for a group final year study into the influence of achievements. CryRally was created by Team Z (David West, Jonny Jacevicius, Reece Lawrence, and I). The aim of the study was to see if players could be influenced by pop-up achievements within a game, similar to Xbox Achievements.
For the ‘Final Year Project’ Games Design module at the University of Bolton, our group had to design and develop a project about a current topic within the games industry, which could potentially be applied to the games industry and be useful to game developers. Over twenty-eight weeks the team had to develop a project through conducting research and testing a theory on a sample of people. This theory was to see if achievements could influence how players play a game. This document is a reflection on the project as a whole, and my personal tasks within the project.
For the ‘Final Year Project’ Games Design module at the University of Bolton, our group had to design and develop a project about a current topic within the games industry, which could potentially be applied to the games industry and be useful to game developers. Over twenty-eight weeks the team had to develop a project through conducting research and testing a theory on a sample of people. This theory was to see if achievements could influence how players play a game. This document is a reflection on the project as a whole, and my personal tasks within the project.
I designed the sandbox/exploration level for our project, and this area was basically where players could find and use all of the race entrances, but it also gave the players to do some exploration between completing the races. The races were designed and created by Reece Lawrence, Jonathan Jacevicius and David West.
The main aim for the sandbox was so the group could add in collection and exploration based achievements; the aim of our entire project was to see if achievements influenced how player's played a game, so we had to include many different types of achievements. |
To download our full project dissertation, click here.
Below are screenshots of the sandbox level I created. The level had to be huge as one of the things we tested for was to see how long players would play the game for achievements. A good example of this was an impossible achievement we included within the game; players had to collect 5 red orbs for an achievements, however there were only 4 red orbs in the level. We wanted to see how long players would spend looking for this missing red orb, in addition to having to explore this large level. During our testing we found that many players did spend at least 10 extra minutes trying to search for the missing orb!
This level was extremely fun to design, as we had to keep in mind achievement design and placement during development. All of the scripting for this level was done by David West.
This level was extremely fun to design, as we had to keep in mind achievement design and placement during development. All of the scripting for this level was done by David West.