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.

There were two keynotes for the Casual Games Summit this year, one yesterday from PlayFirst, and one today from Microsoft Casual Games. To my surprise, it was actually Chris Early from Microsoft who expressed more of a core understanding of the future of casual games.

Before Chris’s talk, I was a bit dismayed at the content in the Casual Games Summit. There’s a lot of recapping about what casual games are: who the target demographic is; what the target platforms are; etc. If you’re here at GDC, chances are you already know this.

Chris realizes that casual games need to continue to innovate. The one statement that summed it up best was that we need to continue to look at casual games as “brand new,” a territory whose horizon is always evolving. Specifically, he understands that innovation in casual games is happening through social networks and the activities involved therein.

Among the specific topics Chris has noticed in casual game innovation are asynchronous play, the ability to play with your friends, mini-games as multiple winning opportunities, data persistence, and pyramiding through the social graph. He knows that the portals need to embrace change, and he’s got the right idea. As an indication, yesterday’s talk on Social Gaming was in front of a crowd that can’t even be described as standing-room only:

To his credit, I’ll also mention that John Welch from PlayFirst had a few key points. One: the minority is still happy with the $20 price model and that we require new business models. Two: casual games are still dominated by clones.

What does this all mean? My hope is that it shows that there will be additional support from those who recognize these facts, enabling the true innovators to get their ideas to market faster, providing new business models for developers to capitalize on their creations. You can see this in the explosion of companies such as SGN, Zynga, and of course, Sharendipity.

It’s worth adding that innovation can come from anywhere – including you - so come innovate using Sharendipity and distribute your creations to your friends!