New Release: Achievements for All!

This week’s release is a pretty exciting one.  For quite a while now we’ve been discussing how exactly to implement user-defined application achievements as well as our own Sharendipity achievements.  Well we’ve settled on a plan and we’re happy to announce a new Achievements feature available to all application creators.

Achievements are a way to establish goals for playing a game or using an application.  Sometimes they’re difficult accomplishments, such as reaching a new high score, and sometimes they’re just for fun.  Either way, it gives application creators a new way to engage their users and allows your friends to see what you’ve been up to in Sharendipity .

One example of a Sharendipity achievement is the Application Creator, which you can earn by publishing your own application in Sharendipity.  As shown below, when these achievements are earned your Facebook friends will be notified through their news feeds (if you are using a Facebook account):

There are additional Sharendipity achievements for both creators and players, such as reaching a certain number of plays for one of your creations, or ranking first place in a published game.

You can create your own achievements through a new option in the Director menu under the Application heading.  The Achievements Manager dialog will display all achievements that have been defined for an application, allowing you to create new achievements and edit existing ones.

To highlight how some of the achievements might be used, I’ve also published a new game called Block Boxer.  This is the view that I see as the creator of the achievements:

The game itself is pretty challenging but a lot of the fun is in trying to unlock all of the achievements.  Here are a few more games that have new achievements :

Scramble, a sliding-puzzle game that uses the Flickr interestingness feed.

Dodge, a game where you have to avoid the enemies by moving your mouse.

For more information and discussion about the Achievements feature, check out the Wiki page.

Happy Father’s Day!

Happy Father’s Day to all the dads out there. We like to celebrate such occasions by making new toys in Sharendipity (of course)! The below app is a great example of a template that you can customize.

Just press the “personalize” button on the app page, and you can swap in your own photos and send it along to your friends and family.

You can make all kinds of custom software – not just games. All it takes is a little creativity and imagination.

Mashup of the day!

Here’s a shout out to Dale for having his Sharendipity creation – Scramble! – become the “mashup of the day” today at ProgrammableWeb.

In Scramble!, Dale created a Flickr web service that pulls photos from their “Interestingness” feed. Then he used some sophisticated scripting to chop up the image to create the puzzle. Nice work!