[idea] Level achievements screen

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zear
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[idea] Level achievements screen

Post by zear »

Hey there, I am merely just a Dingoo port maintainer, so I don't have the skills to code this, but here's an idea that was in my head for a longer time now. I already created a ticket for it here, but I decided I'm gonna share it with you here on this forum.

While playing CG on my Dingoo I noticed that for most of the time you only need to play though very small parts of the maps in order to complete them. You rarely need to explore them. There is a lot of items, especially the ones in hazardous places, that don't give you any reward when you collect them (sure, they give you points, and points == more lives, but with the CG save feature lives are rather redundant). So I thought, why don't we motivate the players to explore the levels and collect the items?
We could do so by keeping track of the number of items collected in every level, and also the best times of completing the levels (for speedruns). That would be divided in two screens. One screen would appear after finishing a level, that would show the current completion time plus the number of items the player has collected in this run. The other screen would be accesible via the main menu and would list the overall best times and number of items collected for each level. If the player collected all the items on a map, a "perfect" text would appear on the list next to the stats of this level.

In order to prevent cheating the level stats would be tracked only if the player didn't use the in-game save feature.

Here is a question for the hardcore players: are there any levels where it is impossible to collect certain items, so one would never be able to collect 100% of them?

So, what do you guys think of it?
Maybe some of you have ideas how to improve my concept? :)

Edit:
Here's a mockup of my idea:
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Grimson
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Post by Grimson »

A good idea, but in my opinion such screen should appear after every level, depicting the statistics of that level only. Then you wouldn't have to disqualify the saving feature.
zear
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Post by zear »

I have nothing against displaying stats for the current level even if you used the save feature. That would be a restriction only for the overall achievements screen that would list the records for all the levels.
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tulip
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Post by tulip »

yeah, I wouldn't disqualify the using the saving feature at all, only using cheats.
But it's a great idea overall, and your mockup should work very well, we may have to think about how this will work in mods before starting to code something.
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zear
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Post by zear »

tulip wrote:yeah, I wouldn't disqualify the using the saving feature at all, only using cheats.
Yeah, though saving is a form of cheating here. Think about it. You can save the state throughout the level and then restore it every time you lose a life, thus no hazard is hard for you, and you can make incredibly fast speedruns if you save often enough.
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tulip
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Post by tulip »

I don't see it as cheating, it isn't cheating in Galaxy, and I'm saying this by looking towards mods, almost nobody even tried because they heard it was hard. Granted original Keen 1 would be incredibly easy with inlevel saving, KeenQ, Smile, KeenZ and others will still pose a challenge.
And as I stated in the "How should death be handled" thread, I like to be able to choose to save or not.
We could add an extra achievement for never using inlevelsaving in a game, and from there we could even go on and make another achievement for not saving at all in a game, but it shouldn't be linked your proposed points achievement.
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lemm
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Post by lemm »

tulip wrote:it isn't cheating in Galaxy
yeah it is
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Post by K1n9_Duk3 »

Those achievements aren't hard to code at all. I wrote a "no inlevel saving" achievement for KEENGINE in about ten minutes, just for fun. But that wasn't included in any release.

For a "collect all goodies" achievement, you could count all the items the player can pick up upon loading the level. Then, you'll just have to add a new counter and count all the goodies the player picks up. At the end of the level, you'll just have to compare both counters.

However, there might be some issues, especially if a mod adds new collectible items in-game by changing a non-goodie tile to a goodie tile.

The Galaxy engine is even wose. There, you'll have to count both tile-goodies and object-goodies. But with some patching, it could be possible to create new object-goodies while running around the level. This would require some extra coding (increase the total amount of goodies each time a new goodie object is created), but it would still be possible.
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Re: [idea] Level achievements screen

Post by DHeadshot »

zear wrote:Here is a question for the hardcore players: are there any levels where it is impossible to collect certain items, so one would never be able to collect 100% of them?
Keen 3 - Caves of Oblivion
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tulip
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Post by tulip »

^

And in fact several items can't be obtained throughout Keen, I believe there is no episode where you can really get everything.
It's usually the same with mods, in most of them there are at least some unreachable items.
But that's not a real probem imo, I rather think if more people notice it will give us some interesting discussions, as to how many somebody could obtain.
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