How can I randomly generate achievements?

Question

Novice programmer here. To challenge my self i want to create an achievement system that randomly generates achievements for me based on a set of trackable metrics within my game.

To keep it as abstract as possible my game is a turn based highscore chaser. Each game has 13 turns. Each turn consists of placing 4 tiles, each tile can have an individual score which together form the turn score. There are 5 different tile types that can be individually combined to raise each tile's score differently. Each turn one of the 5 tiles gets a bonus making it worth double points. Also in each turn you can form "hands" similar to poker where for example two tiles of the same type next to each other are a pair, which nets a hand bonus for individual turns.

Here's what my generated achievements should look like:

Get a turn score of 15 and create a pair using tile type x.
Create a tile type y that has 5 points.
Create 5 hands of type x and use tile type x or y.
Get a total score of 50 without creating more than 3 hands of type x.

Obviously this seems kind of complicated and i'm kind of asking myself how to create such "complex" achievements. Seems like i need to establish some kind of syntax that i can feed the system to produce these kinds of requirements. But i'm kind of stuck since i couldn't find any info on this issue yet.

Maybe you have done something similar?

Answer 1

I'd solve this by breaking down an achievement into constitute parts and then randomly selecting values from pools for each part. Based on your examples, you have an achievement grammar that looks like

achievement = <verb> <instance count> <metric> <value count> [and <achievement>...]

that is, an achievement is a basically a verb associated with a metric which may be joined via 'and' with another achievement up to some arbitrary number of times you'll get to decide (probably no more than twice?)

You'd then define the valid values for each aspect of the grammar. For example, you've already got some metrics:

• turn score
• tile type value
• hand type
• use of tile type

And some verb types (plus a few extra I've made up that might work):

• create
• acquire ("get")
• use (play, as in play a hand)
• last (as in, "last for X turns")

The instance and value counts are just numbers, so you can pick ranges for them that seem appropriate ("5" hands seems reasonable, "0" hands does not, for example).

Whether or not you stick two conditions together with an "and" can just be a fixed percent chance that you deem appropriate. At this point generating a random achievement is simply a process of generating a random value for each component of the grammar.

You'll probably want to introduce some data dependence between the various components. For example, the valid range of values for instance counts might depend on the metric that was randomly selected, because a range of one to five might work for "hands" but may be too small to be a challenge for "score," for example. Similarly you may want to prevent certain verbs being generated with certain metrics because they may be nonsensical for the rest of your game.

Answer 2

Make a base for the types of achievments, like you started. Example in a Hack'n Slash game: Slay X enemies Survive X seconds Block X hits

And so on. Then you need to setup a few metrics. I can't use the same Block metric for the Survive, because Survive 10 seconds is far easier than Blocking 10 times. So, your best bet is to make a multiplier to the random number you got. Slay (rnd() * 50 + 10) enemies Survive (rnd() * 30 + 15) seconds Block(rnd() * 10 + 2) hits

The plus part represents the minimum, and the multiplier the max without the min. So the Slay means that the minimum is 10 up to 60(50+10) enemies.