Inspiration
The inspiration actually just came from my career when I worked in law enforcement myself. You do your best to work your way up the ranks to promote and thats how it is in the Army as well, so this competition was the perfect way to add a new satisfying progression system where you keep playing to climb the ranks in my Army themed game.
What it does
There’s multiple progression systems now implemented in Army Men: Blow em’ up! The Rank up system rewards players for continuously playing the game. Every minute you play you accumulate one promotional point and there are now five ranks that you can climb all requiring more and more promotional points to achieve. To get to the highest level, you’d have to play a great deal of time to achieve it. But each time you promote you get access to new items such as the helmet signifying your rank, a higher leaderboard score and a player animation specific for each rank. When you achieve the two highest ranks you also get access to avatar manipulation like shrinking your avatar or growing it.
Furthermore, there’s another progression system where you can use your time to purchase upgrades for the weapons in the game, which is also a satisfying and motivating reason to keep coming back and playing more.
How we built it
This progression system was built with a combination of code blocks and type script and the desktop editor
Challenges we ran into
Since this is an already established game, my capacity was already pretty high prior to the competition. So trying to add a new feature while maintaining proper frame rate was a challenge I had to work into my equation.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
I’m proud of the overall outcome of the progression system. It feels satisfying. Gives the game more purpose and depth. And it provides a lot more value than I think was previously there.
What we learned
I learned that it’s not too difficult to incorporate a progression system like this. But it does seem to add a much more satisfying level to the game. And I can see the value it would bring to have something simple like this to incentivize people to keep playing.
What's next for Army Men: Blow em’ Up!
So now that this initial progression system has been set up, the next steps will be to add special abilities that are accessible only to the highest ranks. So with future updates, I’d like to bring in new functionalities that the top ranking players can use only. The next upgrade I think I’m going to implement an airstrike that only the highest rank is allowed to use. Things like this I’d like to add an update in time to keep the incentives for players to keep playing and keep coming back.
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