Frayed Knights - Achievement Update

The Rampant Coyote talks about a new Achievement update on his blog for his RPG game Frayed Knights on Steam.

Frayed Knights: The Skull of S’makh-Daon will be up on Steam in a matter of days. It could have been done a lot sooner, but in my stupidity / eagerness, I decided to add achievements to the game.

I don’t know if it’ll make a bit of difference in sales. But I thought it would be fun. I’m stupid that way, I guess. I have a hard deadline of a demo for Frayed Knights 2 that demands my attention, so the timing is bad. I’m futzing about with the old game, getting someone to do the icons, programming the changes in code that I haven’t looked at in over a year, and then… testing. Lots and lots of testing. Even with debug controls, we’re talking double-digit testing to make sure the game runs correctly with the code changes.

Ah, well.  Why do I do this? Because it’s fun. I don’t know if achievements will help sell a single extra copy of the game, but I do this because it’ll make things a little cooler. Hopefully. I can’t depend on awesome high-end graphics and visuals, so I’ve gotta do something, right?

It’s a little weird digging through the old code. After living with this stuff for so long, it’s like going back to the old neighborhood but not quite remembering everything. I don’t have all the tools installed that I used when I worked on it originally, so it’s a little bit harder to find where everything is, although it’s familiar enough that I haven’t had to dig around too much.

I decided against creating achievements that required psychotic multiple play-throughs… I already inflicted that on playtesters back in the day. You will definitely need to explore optional content and uncover a few secrets to get all the achievements, and some of the achievements may require you to make certain choices you might not have made on your original play-through (although if you have a prior saved game, it’s not hard to go back and try alternatives). I guess I just don’t feel it should require ridiculous levels of tedium and effort to get 100%