With the Liberated Pixel Cup coming soon, I’ve begun brainstorming the kinds of features that I’d like my game to have… One thing led to another, and I begun brainstorming about making a system similar to Microsoft’s “Achievements” or Sony’s “Trophies”, but for Free Software and it’s gamers.
And thus, the idea of a Libre Gamer Network begun, and with the input of several friends and other LPC contestants, we came up with 2 pressing needs:
- It has to be federated, so that anyone can make his own network and drag his gamerscore.
- It has to work with lots of languages, like Java, C++ and Python
- There’s 3 components to this: A Client, a Server and a WebUI.
I’d love to work on this kind of project, but while I’ve worked on games and websites, I’ve never actually worked on an API at this level, and would appreciate any and all ideas and help that I can get.
The needs we’ve established are:
- A list of games, with their OSI-Approved license, and a link to each game.
- A list of achievements per game, it’s icon, description and value (As well as marking some as secret).
- A list of score boards (For high scores!).
- A Friends List
- A list of games played by a player
- Options to remove some games or achievements from the player (The player should always be in control of his data)
We’ve thought about this long and hard, and I believe there’s no way to actually secure such a system against cheaters, so before you ask, this would have absolutely no built-in system against cheaters.
It would simply be a peer-based system, where each Player can compare himself to his friends.
Any Game-Devs out there want to voice their opinion? Would you be interesting in implementing this on a game? What features would you like? How would it be best handled?
–
Nushio
I believe the open-source project you’re looking for is this one! It’s designed for the educational market, but the system of authentication and such is exactly what you need, and any game or game service like Desura could roll their own “backpack” of open badges / achievements.
There’s a WordPress project implementing them that’s heavily used by some big organizations, but it’s not up for download yet.
Thanks Taryn, one of the LPC Admins did show me about OpenBadges but said it would be pretty confusing to have Gaming badges along with Website badges, so even he wasn’t sure if OpenBadges would be the way to go.
We’re actually planning on setting up an OpenBadges server in Fedora, and hooking it into the work for real-time messaging, so that as people “do things” in Fedora, they are earning Badges.
I think we could also use that same infrastructure to provide badges for a Libre Gamer Network…
Nice!
I’m not sure how I’d feel getting the ‘backpack’ mixed up between gaming medals and website medals, but it might be fun.
I’ll try to whip up a Java API and experiment with it, but this seems to be made mostly for websites, not for games in mind.
I think we should be able to simply use the same infrastructure and possibly host a separate instance for the gaming medals. I just hate to reinvent the wheel here, when this seems like it is 90% of the way there.
I’d hate to reinvent it as well. I’ll look into writing a Java API that uses the OpenBadge medals
I need to get this ready before the LPC. Can’t wait