Steam achievements and new droids!

Steam Achievements and Leaderboard

Last time I mentioned Steam SDK and that I was starting to work with it. After all, everything went very smoothly. The achievement system was very easy to set up thanks to guides from https://godotsteam.com/ and documentation from Steam. Both websites provide everything you need to get the achievement system up and running, and I have to admit, it was a pretty sweet feeling to see the achievement pop-up coming up for the first time during the testing.

First, the achievements were the only thing I had planned to be implemented, but leaderboards and high scores can be implemented on Steam too. So I decided to do a little investigation and see how hard it could be to implement the whole scoreboard to Steam and therefore get some sort of competition element to the game.

Well, the short answer is easy, and not so easy.

The scores were somewhat easygoing, but the user names were the tricky part. Apparently you can get Steam account usernames from your friends list or from the game lobby just like that, but if users are not in your friends list, and in this case there is no lobby. It will come with a bit of difficulty.

I think there is a way to search them by SteamID, but that could take a relatively long time, so I'm not sure if that's going to work. And however, I did not get any working solutions for this, so I do not know how long it actually takes.

What I managed to get working is a system where players could write a custom name for the leaderboard scores, but I have some fears about the names I could see on the board.

Some validations for the names might work, but in the end someone will bypass it with some peculiar character combination.

So for now, the Steam leaderboard is not included. The implementation still remains under the hood, so I could check this again in the future.

Special waves and special droids

More droids are also joining the ranks! So let's introduce them right away:

Blue v2.0:

• Shoots EMP projectiles that move randomly
• Also has "shockwave," which protects from bullets and slows down the player if he/she hits it. The blue v1.0 has this very same ability.

Special enemy: Banshee

• Can use invisibility for sometime
• Shoots beam projectiles at short range.
• Shoots "system shock" or "system stun" projectiles, which causes player utilities to go off. It means power-ups, dash, and minimap are out of use for a while.

Right now the Banshee serves as a mini-boss, so I would not like to spoil it too much. But here is the look, at least.

Some end thoughts once again

New enemy variants are now in place, and the end boss is also coming up nicely. Yes, there will be the boss battle at the end. But still I feel a bit worried about the schedule I have given to myself. I will finish this up this year, but is the end result the one I was looking for?

Also, it feels a bit frustrating to create "marketing" material for social media all the time, and only for a couple of views? Well, this is not a good thing, but I have heard that other indie developers struggle with this very same thing. At least for the views part. Or maybe the game is just not the coolest-looking?

I also want to mention that I sent Enfora Star to GDWC So wish me luck! I don't have many expectations, but I have thoughts of participating in the competition from 2017, and almost a decade later, I finally get there!

And check the Haapa Games YouTube channel

Subscribe to it too; don't make my frustration go to waste! ;)

I guess that's it for now. Enjoy the summer!

Teemu, TheAspen