In this Dev Update, we’ll be talking a little bit about the relaunch of our long-awaited Achievements system, which will be the focal point of our 10th anniversary celebration in June 2023.
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It’s been a long journey, but we are reaching the point in our refactoring efforts where the hard work has paid off, and this means that the site will be in a good position for us to finally bring back our Achievements system. We thought there was no better way to celebrate such a monumental engineering effort than our upcoming 10th anniversary.
Why Did You Wait?
We’ve gotten some questions in the last few years about why we needed to wait until the very final stages of the site refactor to develop and relaunch achievements.
The simplest and most concise way to answer that question is:
If we had launched achievements before all major systems had been converted to the new code base, we would need to perform refactor work not only on the features themselves, but also on the achievements associated with each feature (and all their corresponding progress data). This would have been inefficient; we do not want to essentially duplicate what is already a huge workload.
Refactoring the site first gives a nice clean slate and foundation with which to build the new achievements system, which touches nearly every aspect of Flight Rising.
Why the Anniversary?
Given the size and complexity of something like an achievements system, it was paramount that we factored in ample time for planning, execution, testing, and reflection of each milestone, as well as staying committed to our company philosophy of avoiding crunch.
Because the achievements roadmap coincided nearly perfectly with our game’s anniversary, it just made sense to make it our major feature update for next year’s festivities. While we are generally always working on multiple things at once, the magnitude of this update does mean that our engineering team will need to dedicate a lot of resources towards it for the first half of 2023.
What You Can Expect
On to some of the cool stuff we can share! Please be aware that all of this is subject to change.
The Achievements Themselves
As of today’s Dev Update we have over 500 achievements planned that we aim to have ready to go on launch day. For those that have been with us since Flight Rising’s early days, you will know that this is a massive increase in what was available before! It’s an ambitious goal—and there’s a chance that we may not meet it—but we wanted to start boldly.
From a design standpoint, our goal for achievement criteria is to make them as enjoyable as possible, incorporate them into many of the activities you’re already doing on the website, and provide all types of players some opportunities to feel accomplished.
In the legacy system, achievements rewarded non-functional points (internally, we affectionately called these “Starmies”—can you tell there are some Pokemon fans on the team?). With the revamp, completing achievements will reward you with not only points, but a special new currency, as well as a chance for some treasure and gems. The new currency is slated to be usable in a dedicated Grand Exchange shop that will launch alongside the system, stocked with new and exciting items for you and your clan!
Pursuits
One challenge with a finite list of achievements is that it’s possible (at least for a time) to hit the end of the road and for progression to slow down considerably until new objectives are created. By having achievements grant a spendable currency, it meant that at any given time you could only earn so much of it. We don't think it would feel great if you wanted more copies of items in the Grand Exchange achievements shop, or if new items were added later after you had spent most (or quite possibly all) of that new currency. This, of course, created a dilemma for Flight Rising, where most activities can be repeated in some fashion and eventually get you toward that thing you wanted.
To help alleviate this, we’re planning to develop an adjacent system called Pursuits. It’s easiest to think of pursuits as repeatable “micro-achievements”, as they’ll usually be more common activities that are easier to complete (e.g. “Breed a pair of dragons”, “exalt a dragon”, “convert 50 meat food points in the same action”). Each completed pursuit will help advance a segmented rewards meter, and when each segment fills up you will be able to claim small batches of the new achievement currency.
While specifics are still being finalized, our current plan is for this system to offer a set number each of three pursuit types: daily, weekly, and monthly. These lists will reset as often as their name implies, with each pursuit type having a “meter weight” that corresponds to its difficulty. In general, daily pursuits should be really easy and have a lower weight, while monthly pursuits will be moderately challenging and have a higher weight.
Our hope is that this supplemental system will allow you to continue to make incremental gains of the achievement currency to use in the accompanying shop.
Do We Have to Start All Over?
Quite possibly the toughest challenge in relaunching this system centers around the fact that every one of you will be at a different place in your Flight Rising journey come launch day. Some of you have been around for the last decade and just by the nature of playing for so long have likely completed the criteria of a large portion of the achievements we’re in the midst of developing. Many more of you might just be joining the world of Sornieth and still figuring it all out.
How do we strike a fair balance between those experiences? Can we and should we grant anything retroactively?
It’s a hard question to answer, and unfortunately the best solution hasn’t yet materialized. We know that we’re not able to promise retroactive achievement progress for gameplay history that came before the kick-off of this new version. The data is very old, unoptimized, full of gaps, and the new infrastructure handles progression in entirely different ways.
However, we are hoping that by intentionally/carefully creating the system in pieces, we may (may!) have enough collected data by the anniversary that many of our players will have lots of achievements completed and ready to collect, alongside others yet to be tackled.
And that’s our update for today! As with all of our anniversaries, there will be plenty of goodies to enjoy to go along with the long-awaited return of achievements.
We’ve still got a long road in front of us to get this feature out the door for the 10th Anniversary, but our eyes are already set on the prize. We’re really excited to celebrate what is truly a special milestone in the life of any game, and we’re thankful and grateful to have made it this far with all of you.
Flight Rising Developer
Project Management | Engineering Team Cheerleader | UI Designer
Project Management | Engineering Team Cheerleader | UI Designer