You’ll have to forgive me because I’m barely a developer, but what I’ve seen indie devs use is when the game is ~95% completed or in early-access or beta, you add achievements to keep track of general player’s progress and see what features are being used or not, which lets you hone in on areas of the game that may need attention or aren’t being used.
Sometimes this is just for post-1.0 patches but it can also be to determine what the next project is going to look like if certain features didn’t seem to get any attention.
The achievements are an after-thought. You add the analytics during development, it’s hard to make meaningful decisions without data and you would do work on achievements that you would throw away.
Each time I have had to add achievements they end up beside the analytics code inside the same abstraction layers. Some of the cool achievements do require adding more tracking code, the the amount of data that is gathered is wild.
You’ll have to forgive me because I’m barely a developer, but what I’ve seen indie devs use is when the game is ~95% completed or in early-access or beta, you add achievements to keep track of general player’s progress and see what features are being used or not, which lets you hone in on areas of the game that may need attention or aren’t being used.
Sometimes this is just for post-1.0 patches but it can also be to determine what the next project is going to look like if certain features didn’t seem to get any attention.
The achievements are an after-thought. You add the analytics during development, it’s hard to make meaningful decisions without data and you would do work on achievements that you would throw away. Each time I have had to add achievements they end up beside the analytics code inside the same abstraction layers. Some of the cool achievements do require adding more tracking code, the the amount of data that is gathered is wild.