December 8 Update (Patreon)

Thanks to everyone for being patient with me as I don't rush this update public. I intend to do so soon (next weekend), which will include the first public test of the Steam achievements. After that, I intend to expand to the full set of achievements, so this week I want to talk about those.

There are some people who strongly feel that achievements should be rare and optional, and I'm going to tell those people up front that TLS will not follow that philosophy. Players like getting achievements, especially on a long game, so I think it's in the game's best interest to have a ton of them. Some players will check the achievements list to evaluate the game, so it should hint at various things. Finally, it is one of the few non-invasive ways to collect data about player choices and progress.

Here are my plans for all the achievements in TLS:

Plot milestones, at minimum every chapter.

Achievement for every character joining the harem.

Achievement for maxing each maxable character.

Maybe for beating various plot bosses?

Definitely every optional boss.

All five Incubus items, of course.

I like the idea of rewarding good performance in various events, but I'm unsure about executing this. Wouldn't have to be perfect results, just to represent the game's non-combat elements.

Achievement for each shining sword.

Capstone achievements, like full harem, full library, and all swords.

Those are my ideas so far, does anyone have other suggestions? I think more is better: with a game this long, even a large number of achievements will feel rationed out.

The one thing I don't want to do is achievements that would require replaying at length, such as both version of Varia all the way to the end. One exception occurs to me: I might want to hand out achievements for choosing Lynine or Orilise, since that section is fairly self-contained. Wish I had more ideas for minor branching, but I'm unsure.

Anyway, I'm not going to try to include all achievements now. But if the script works as intended, I intend to organize all of these (along with some other features) for the next build of the game.