Nicademus
10-01-2009, 10:17 AM
I just wanted to say that it is great to see people are still unlocking these relatively easy achievements one year later. I was the designer in charge of the achievements on the game and love reading about people getting 1000 pts.
It was hard trying to shoehorn achievements into a shallow arcade style racing game, but I always had the goal of no online achievements. I took a cue from COD4 on this one, and was sure no one would be playing this online, so ranked match achievements would be a dumb idea. But I pushed to make sure that if someone DID play online, the stats still counted towards achievements. In the end I suppose I could have made some bigger, for things like losing items, or knockoffs, but we submitted the achievements early on and there was no going back very early on.
This was my first game making achievements for, and the first time I played the game I had 600 pts, then unlocked 4 achievements for 400 pts (timed Ironman perfectly). In a small way, I felt like a pretty pathetic designer when I saw that pop up.
I don't know how many people noticed, but look at your distance driven vs time played. Generally if you divide time played by distance driven you will average 300 mph. As lame as this may seem, it is intentional. I went through each track and measured the length of 1 lap. Then made a spreadsheet which calculated what the general distance driven would be of someone who drove every single race in the game once and never restarted a race. It came out to somewhere around 250 miles (wow, short.) I really wanted a 1000 mile achievement, being the Baja 1000 and all, and pushed the programmers to put a multiplier in there for the distance driven. I felt it would WAY harsh to expect players to complete the career 4 times over in order to get the achievement, or play online for hours upon hours. We wanted to go for accessible and fun, and that is why you can drive about 800 miles if you do every career race once without restarting.
Regardless of how good or bad the game is or was, I had a great time making the achievements for the game, and I hope that you all had a fun time getting them. To this day I am still fairly proud of Cataviņa, but really, really wish we had more development time.
It was hard trying to shoehorn achievements into a shallow arcade style racing game, but I always had the goal of no online achievements. I took a cue from COD4 on this one, and was sure no one would be playing this online, so ranked match achievements would be a dumb idea. But I pushed to make sure that if someone DID play online, the stats still counted towards achievements. In the end I suppose I could have made some bigger, for things like losing items, or knockoffs, but we submitted the achievements early on and there was no going back very early on.
This was my first game making achievements for, and the first time I played the game I had 600 pts, then unlocked 4 achievements for 400 pts (timed Ironman perfectly). In a small way, I felt like a pretty pathetic designer when I saw that pop up.
I don't know how many people noticed, but look at your distance driven vs time played. Generally if you divide time played by distance driven you will average 300 mph. As lame as this may seem, it is intentional. I went through each track and measured the length of 1 lap. Then made a spreadsheet which calculated what the general distance driven would be of someone who drove every single race in the game once and never restarted a race. It came out to somewhere around 250 miles (wow, short.) I really wanted a 1000 mile achievement, being the Baja 1000 and all, and pushed the programmers to put a multiplier in there for the distance driven. I felt it would WAY harsh to expect players to complete the career 4 times over in order to get the achievement, or play online for hours upon hours. We wanted to go for accessible and fun, and that is why you can drive about 800 miles if you do every career race once without restarting.
Regardless of how good or bad the game is or was, I had a great time making the achievements for the game, and I hope that you all had a fun time getting them. To this day I am still fairly proud of Cataviņa, but really, really wish we had more development time.