RAJEN: Hi.
Rajen, here at Epic Games.
We recently made Epic Games Store achievements
available to all games that publish on the Epic Games Store.
After working with dozens of developers over the past few months
during our early access phase, we are now
very excited to bring this feature to everyone.
Epic Games Store achievements build on the existing Epic Online Services
achievements.
So let's take a look at both, what the similarities and differences
are, how they're set up, and what the developer and player
experiences look like.
The Epic ecosystem now offers two tiers of achievements--
Epic Online Services achievements and Epic Games Store achievements.
Epic Online Services are a set of free services
that any developer can use to power their game with functionality,
such as multiplayer, voice, leaderboards,
and of course, achievements, regardless
of where they publish their games.
Epic Online Services achievements are meant
as a functional layer for developers to define and integrate achievements
into their game without restrictions on how
these achievements are unlocked, scored, or shown to players.
In other words, you can integrate Epic Online Services achievements
in your game, publish the game on any platform or storefront,
and be in complete control of the player experience.
The Epic Game Social overlay does display Epic Online Services
achievement unlocks and the full list of achievements
when implemented in the game.
Epic Games Store achievements build on Epic Online Services achievements
and are, as the name implies, deeply connected to the Epic Games Store
player experience.
Adding Epic Games Store achievements only
requires configuration in the developer portal
to define XP for each achievement.
So no additional code is required.
Once Epic Games Store achievements are configured and published,
players earn XP for each achievement unlocked, adding to their total XP.
Epic Games Store achievements are tiered into bronze, silver,
and gold, and an additional platinum tier
is granted by earning 1,000 XP in a game.
And because they build on Epic Online Services achievements,
progress will carry over to the Epic Games Store achievements,
no matter on what platform that progress is made.
To add Epic Online Services achievements to a game,
developers use the SDK.
Check out the links in the description for more information
on that process.
Setting up Epic Games Store achievements,
however, only takes a few minutes in the developer portal.
So let's take a look at that right now.
Developers who have integrated Epic Online Services achievements
will already have a list of achievements
configured in the developer portal, as shown here.
What's new is the Epic Games Store achievements tab
next to the Epic Online Services achievements.
Clicking on this tab reveals the three steps
necessary to set up our product for Epic Games Store achievements.
One, have the organization owner accept a developer agreement.
Two, generate sandboxes and deployments.
And three, select the primary deployment for each sandbox.
Once the developer agreement is accepted,
step two is to generate sandboxes and deployments.
Epic Online Services user data is scoped to a specific deployment
so generating dev and stage sandboxes and deployments will give us three
distinct environments to work in.
I'll leave a link in the description to our documentation on sandboxes
and deployments, in case you are not familiar with these concepts.
Once the sandboxes and deployments are generated,
step three will become active.
Here, you will see the auto-generated deployment
for dev and stage selected by default. It's likely
that you won't have additional deployments created
in the live sandbox, in which case, the release deployment
will be selected.
Note that this primary deployment designation is used to define where
Epic Games Store achievements are available and cannot be changed once
submitted.
Next, achievements will have to be created in the new dev deployment.
They can be created from scratch, or, like in our case, exported
from our existing Epic Online Services achievements.
We can export them by switching to the release
deployment in the dropdown box and use
step one of the bulk import-export functionality.
Now we can select the dev deployment and open the bulk import-export tool
once again.
We can now skip step one and download the Epic Games Store achievements
zip template in step two to see what changes need
to be made to our exported data.
After extracting the archive we can open the achievements
definition template CSV file.
Here, we see that it has an additional user Epic achievements XP
column, which we'll have to add to our exported definitions.
The localizations and stats CSV files can be used as is.
Finally, we create a new zip archive with the modified files
and go back to the bulk import-export screen to upload it.
When the page refreshes, the new achievements
are shown in the dev deployment, and we
validate that they're all correctly linked
to Epic Games Store achievements.
That's it.
Now we can configure a build of our game
to use the dev sandbox and deployment,
and we can validate that achievements now
show the Epic Games Store achievement unlock UI and they grant XP.
Now you know how to configure Epic Games Store
achievements in the developer portal to add XP to your existing Epic
Online Services achievements and how Epic Online Services achievements
enable any developer to implement achievements
in their game, regardless of platform or storefront.
I'm looking forward to unlocking Epic Games Store
achievements in your game next and add to my total XP.
Check out the links in the description for more information,
and see you next time.