The Achievement Engine

Update: Since this post was written, the Achievement panel has been broken out into its own full-screen modal, you'll find it in the upper nav bar between the help icon and the three-dot menu.

Hello everyone,

In an immeasurable effort of pure will, I've managed to pry myself away from Armored Core long enough to write this post. Maybe you did too, to read this post, in which case I'll keep it brief:

The boring stuff:

v3 work continues apace, I returned from traveling and spent the last week setting up some new user data systems to interact with both the new local storage (not localStorage!) scheme and forthcoming changes to the user data stores on the back end. It's much more simple, and much more robust, and should finally put to rest forever (famous last words) a lot of the difficulties involved in correctly syncing user data, overwriting or not overwriting data inappropriately, all that bad stuff that sucked.

A nice upside of this is that I'm able to give users a lot more visibility into their own data without  asking them to poke around in browser dev modes. I've also overhauled my error logging system to provide much better and more traceable errors, under various logging sensitivities, which will be helpful to myself and other developers, as well as LCP creators and the like.

Timestamps, reasonable traces, caller info? Nice. The little copy button will also put a clean and readable text version of this into your clipboard for eg. pasting into the discord.

okay yes, this is for nerds, I'll get to the good stuff.

The good stuff:

cheevos baby! This has been a dumb fun thing that I've wanted for a long time but there was always something more important to work on. There still is, but I'm at the point where I can start building it into the system.  Let me talk a little bit about how it's going to work:

COMP/CON will watch for stuff you do in the app, then automatically award you with achievements, exactly like Steam etc. It'll require no additional input from players or GMs, you should just get a toast every once in a while for having done something cool.

These, for the most part, will only trigger in Active Mode, though some will be available in Pilot Mode. Many more of them will be available in the new active and live-play active modes. These upgraded modes each demand posts of their own, so I won't go into a ton of detail, but in short the live-play mode grants me access to a lot more useful encounter data, and I can make these achievements focused and specific in a way that would be impossible in v2.

Also, many of these will be hidden and encrypted by a means that I hope will frustrate most data mining efforts. I think it would be a fun community challenge to find and unlock some of the wilder and more esoteric ones. Additionally, I know people have tons of ideas for these so I'd like to have a big chunk of them community-sourced. Patrons will get first crack, and I'll work with you to make sure they get in, in some form. Past patrons, too. I'll put the call out when I'm in a place to start really rolling on these.

In thinking about this now I'm going to break the Achievements panel out into its own UI element, probably accessed alongside Options, because there are already a bunch there and I'm sure once everyone gets cooking there'll probably be hundreds of them. I think that would be extremely cool, and I don't think there's another TTRPG out there with an achievement system like this.

That's all for now, if you want to look at the early extremely-alpha-version list it's up at https://cc-dev-preview.netlify.app/ (options>settings). The next post here will probably be pretty dry, so in the meantime I'll work on getting a list of what C/C can and can't do in terms of tracking and get a form or something in place where people can start dropping ideas.

Thank you, as always, for your continued generosity,
Beef