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Achievements

Achievements can be a great way to increase your users’ engagement within your game and can also be a fun way for players to compare their progress with each other and engage in light-hearted competition.

Attributes

To understand how achievements work, you’ll want to be familiar with some of the attributes associated with them.

The basics These basic elements are associated with every achievement:

  • Id is a unique string that is generated by the Google Play Console. You’ll use this unique ID to refer to the achievement in your game clients.
  • Name is a short name of the achievement (for example, “Master Pieman”). The value can be up to 100 characters.
  • Description is a concise description about your achievement. Usually this tells your player how to earn the achievement (for example, “Bake a lemon meringue pie before sundown”). The value can be up to 500 characters.
  • Icon is a square icon that is associated with your achievement. For best practices when creating your achievement icons, see the Icon Guidelines section.
  • List order is the order in which the locked achievements appear when a player views the achievements associated with your game. This can be in any order that you like. Unlocked achievements appear at the top of the list in the order achieved. State

Achievements can be in one of three different states:

  • A hidden achievement means that details about the achievement are hidden from the player. The Google Play games services provides a generic placeholder description and icon for the achievement while it’s in a hidden state. We recommend making an achievement hidden if it contains a spoiler you don’t want to reveal about your game too early (for example, “Discover that you were a ghost all along!”).
  • A revealed achievement means that the player knows about the achievement, but hasn’t earned it yet. Most achievements start in the revealed state.
  • An unlocked achievement means that the player has successfully earned the achievement. An achievement can be unlocked offline. When the game comes online, it syncs with the Google Play games services to update the achievement’s unlocked state.

Incremental

Achievements can be designated as standard or incremental. Generally, an incremental achievement involves a player making gradual progress towards earning the achievement over a longer period of time. Once the total number of steps reaches the unlock value, the achievement is unlocked (even if it was hidden). There’s no need for you to store the user’s cumulative progress.

Icon guidelines

Icons should be created as 512 x 512 PNG or JPG files. You only need to provide us with the icon for the unlocked achievement. We will generate a grayscale version for the revealed icon automatically. For that reason, we recommend your achievement icons include colorful elements, so your users can easily distinguish between revealed and unlocked achievements.

Creating an achievement

To create an achievement …

Select the Achievements on the left, and click the New Achievement button.

Then, simply fill out the information required for this achievement.

Click Save, and your achievement will be made available.

Editing an achievement

To edit an achievement that you’ve already created, select the achievement in the Achievements tab of the Google Play Console. At this point, you will see the same form you used when first creating the achievement, and you can edit any of the fields as you wish.