Achievements to Prompt Replays

November 15, 2019

I’ve been continuing to finalize the last handful of side investigations in Sleuthhounds: Cruise this week. While working on the sides it’s a great time to start thinking about potential achievements to include in the game. In the previous Sleuthhounds games I’ve typically assigned achievements to alternate or optional things players can do. The same holds true in Cruise as well, which is why it’s the perfect time to come up with some of these.

As far as adventure games go, I see achievements as the modern evolution of the old point scoring system included in Sierra’s classic adventures (which itself was derived from the point system in the original Colossal Cave text adventure). In those games, every action was assigned a point value. Completing those games usually showed how many points out of the total possible had been achieved. The idea, presumably, was to replay the games looking for missing actions to get the best score possible. The issue with this system is that it gave no information on how many actions (actions not points) had been missed as well as no direction as to where to even start looking. I never felt the least bit compelled to try to better my score in Sierra’s games for these reasons.

Achievements, I feel, take what points tried to do – get players to replay the games – and makes the concept more workable. Typically achievements provide some manner of hints – either through the images on their badges or through the text description accompanying them – as to where to look and what to do to accomplish them. Achievements make for a much better carrot than arbitrary points do.

Given the size of Cruise, there are quite a number of optional side quests and other lesser things to discover. As well, several of the major scenarios in the game have multiple possible solutions. All of these are candidates for having achievements assigned. Even so, I don’t want to go nuts and have a bazillion achievements in the game. So for now, I’m just sorting out potential achievements. I’ll finalize the list at some point in the future once all the interactive stuff in the game has been properly slotted into place.