Level Up Workshop: Quests, Achievements, & Dailies

Updates Community & Events
#1

Hi, Developers!

We’ve got a new workshop video to share with you this week featuring Quests, Achievements and Dailies! In Level Up workshops, a member of the Roblox Game Insights team hosts an interactive presentation on a game design topic such as season pass feature balance or content cadence. In these events, industry best practices and professional materials are shared, and attendees ask questions in a live Q&A.

Quests, Achievements and Dailies

Quests, achievements, and dailies are tasks that players complete in exchange for a reward. But don’t let their simplicity fool you; it takes thoughtful design and purposeful writing to ensure that your quests are clear, concise and engaging!

QDA-Part1

Part One: Introduction

In Part One of this three-part workshop series, Game Insights designer Erin Jennings introduces the topic of quests, achievements, and dailies.

Learn about the functions that quests can serve in a game, including retention and engagement, tutorials, currency drips, narrative and more! Finally, you’ll set up your own quest content spreadsheet to streamline your quest development process.

Watch Part One on YouTube

Download the presentation and quest content spreadsheet:
PART 1 - INTRODUCTION.zip (2.1 MB)

Presentation outline:

  • What are quests, achievements and dailies?

  • What functions can quests, achievements and dailies serve?

    • Retention & engagement
    • Progression
    • Surfacing
    • Session variety
    • Tutorials
    • Resource drips
    • Narrative
    • Limited-time content
    • Special events

  • Quest content spreadsheet setup



QDA 2

Part Two: Design

In Part Two of this Level Up workshop, Erin dives into the design of quests, achievements, and dailies. She discusses the importance of drawing on all of your game’s systems and content, focusing on variety and creating an engaging player experience.

The workshop wraps up with a closer look at difficulty and pacing to ensure that your quests are the right amount of challenging!

Watch Part Two on YouTube

Download the presentation:
Quests, Achievements, & Dailies Part 2: Design.pdf (1.2 MB)

Presentation outline:

  1. Designing quest tasks

    • Touch all of your game’s systems
    • Touch all of your game’s content
    • Create variety in your quest tasks
    • Be mindful of the player experience

  2. Understanding difficulty

    • Why difficulty matters
    • Difficulty inherent to the task type
    • Difficulty modified by other factors

  3. Complexity in quest design

  4. Pacing of quests

  5. Supporting your quest system into the future



QDA writing

Part Three: Writing

The third and final part of this workshop focuses on writing quest text that is clear and engaging. Erin sets out goals for your text and offers tips on being concise, consistent, immersive and more! Then she takes you back into the quest content spreadsheet to demonstrate the value of documenting your quests.

Watch Part Three on YouTube

Have your content spreadsheet ready from Part One and download the presentation here: Quests, Achievements, & Dailies Part 3: Writing.pdf (2.3 MB)

Presentation outline:

  • Task text goals
    • Concise
    • Consistent
    • Accurate
    • Precise
    • Immersive
    • Helpful
  • Additional quest strings
    • Title
    • Flavor text
  • Using the quest content spreadsheet

Share your thoughts on the workshop below and follow us on YouTube to get notified when we share future Level Up workshops

56 Likes
#2

This topic was automatically opened after 10 minutes.

#3

This is very interesting and im very happy about this

6 Likes
#4

I’m excited every Workshops since I know this workshops can help me improve on my future projects and etc. :heart:

4 Likes
#5

Very interesting, I can’t wait to watch all of this and keep it up!

2 Likes
#6

I bet 80% people expected robux or some avatar items (including me lol)

1 Like
#7

I thought “quests” or “challenges” players could complete in exchange for various types of rewards was a brilliant idea, though if one of the rewards WERE to be ROBUX, it could indeed be exploited in some manner.

1 Like
#8

It looks like it promises a lot, I hope its great for everyone.
Seeing this really gives happiness

#9

In the second part of this, or another video, could you talk about quest systems in specific genres of games? Quests and achievements are used in many different games and I’d love to see how you think they should be implemented for each game genre.

Also, could you guys make a video game that goes along with the workshops? It would be interesting to see how new workshops contribute to a game. Plus, making a game with the features you guys talk about could really show how much each thing brings to a game.

#10

Will be an interesting watch, I love these types of videos. Keep them coming!

1 Like
#11

I believe roblox has strong restrictions and it there are staffs who are 24/7 online they do really check on us

#12

You must be kidding. There is literally a Russian Roulette game on my home page that has been up for 2 months and it has not been deleted. Russian Roulette games are forbidden, as per the ROBLOX terms of service.

1 Like
#13

Hey, Redirect! Part Two (coming this week) goes into detail on designing quests, with one prominent example genre. Additional examples aren’t currently planned, but we can explore that. In the meantime, if you have any questions about designing quests for a particular genre, we’d be happy to answer them for you.

As for a game that provides interactive examples for some of our workshops, that would be AMAZING! It’s something that we’ve discussed, but we have to weigh the development time for that experience vs. releasing more videos. If we can find a way to make that work, I know it’s something that the team is excited about. We’ll keep trying to find ways to make Level Up content more useful – thank you for the suggestions!

2 Likes
#14

Hey, thanks for responding. I am currently trying to make a high quality 3D platformer on Roblox, specifically a collect-a-thon. This particular game genre is heavy on the use of quests with NPCs so I’d like to get it right.

Any tips or things I should keep in mind for the 3D platformer genre? ( Quests specifically, but any info on the subject would also be great. )

If you need a reference on the genre, Spyros reignited trilogy does a great job on it. ( This game has NPCs and quests, which I am studying myself, but I’d like more info on the matter. )

#15

Hello again, I have some criticism for the videos. Although they give great information, I feel like many just leave the videos as they are not very entertaining and get bland after a while. I recommend giving examples of games that do the job right and showing gameplay of those games. I feel like showing games outside of Roblox would also be beneficial to developers.

I feel videos like this would teach people things more effectively and allow more developers to “level up” their games.

This would require more time being put into the videos, and I don’t know if editing is anyone’s forte here, but here are some YouTube videos that I feel did it right:

Each video gives examples of games of all genres and gives good and bad examples of the topic and how to improve it for your game.

1 Like
#16

Hey, Redirect! Sorry for the delayed response. That’s an excellent question!

Here are some thoughts that the Game Insights team put together for you:

Getting quests

  • Make sure that quest-giving NPCs are obvious and conveniently located, especially when they have a quest to give. Don’t make players waste time searching just to be able to play
  • If there is narrative or flavor text delivered by NPCs, keep it succinct
    • If possible, allow players to review this text for context or hints if they return to the NPC

Completing quests

  • Make sure that turning in quests is low-friction (eg: does not require returning to NPC unless it’s in a commonly-traveled hub area)
  • Although automatically delivering rewards upon quest completion is low in friction, there are some advantages to forcing players to manually collect rewards in UI:
    • They are more likely to understand what they were awarded and why
    • It drives them back into the quest UI, re-surfacing the feature and reminding them of their active quests

Quest UI/UX

  • Make sure that your quest UI shows the rewards to be earned and progress toward earning them
  • Deep link to shop UI when purchasing items is an option to complete the quest (this reduces friction by allowing players to quickly access the shop UI from the quest UI)
  • If you intend to have a large number of active quests, include a Quest log UI
    • Automatically sort active quests. This is generally a good order from top to bottom:
      • Completed quests with uncollected rewards
      • Partial progress
      • New/No progress
    • If you display the active quest objectives and progress on the HUD (which I recommend), you can reduce clutter by allowing players to select a single quest to display — the one that they want to focus on in the moment
    • Since quests can become overwhelming, consider letting players delete quests that are not required from their log (especially if they could later pick them up from the quest-givers again)
  • Use notification badges on the UI to alert players when they have a new quest, rewards to collect, etc.

Progression

  • Be very deliberate in how quest content rolls out to players:
    • Start with one available quest and add on as the player makes progress
    • Quest content rollout should flow logically with the player’s progress through the map
      • Group available quest objectives together in a zone to avoid making the player run back and forth across areas they’ve already been
    • Tune XP rewards and player upgrades such that when they complete the quest content in one area, they are prepared for the challenges of the next area

Quest content examples
Here are some examples that have been broken down to show how much variety can be created from them:

  • Travel to POI
    • Generic travel: travel n studs, visit n towns
    • Specific travel: travel to the Forbidden Forest
  • Talk to NPC
    • Generic talk to NPCs: talk to n villagers
    • Talk to a specific NPC
  • Collect items
    • Generic collect items: pick up n power-ups
    • Collect specific items: collect n coins
  • Find secret areas
    • Generic find secret areas: locate n secret areas
    • Find specific secret areas: find the secret area in the Forbidden Forest
  • Use abilities (double-jump etc)
    • Generic use abilities: use abilities n times
    • Use specific abilities: use ground pound n times
    • Use generic abilities in specific context (eg: use abilities n times to kill enemies)
    • Use specific abilities in specific context (eg: use double-jump to cross chasms n times)
  • Kill enemies
    • Generic kill enemies
    • Kill specific enemies
    • Use generic abilities in specific context (eg: use abilities to kill n slimes)
    • Use specific abilities in generic context (eg: ground-pound to kill n enemies)
    • Use specific abilities in specific context (eg: ground-pound to kill n slimes)

I hope you find these notes useful!

6 Likes
#17

Hi, Redirect! Thank you for the thoughtful feedback.

Your criticism is spot-on. We definitely do want to provide more examples in our videos. We are a bit limited in what we can include (non-Roblox games are unfortunately a no-go, for example) but we are brainstorming ways to provide examples within our limitations. They’re pretty neat, and I hope we’ll be able to roll them out soon!

I appreciate the example videos that you linked and will take a close look at them. We’re always looking for more inspiration, so these are great.

Thanks for taking the time to help us make Level Up better!

3 Likes
#18

For part 3, can you add the link for the presentation download. Thanks.

#19

Hey there! Sorry about that – the presentation PDF for Part 3 has been added above. :slight_smile:

#20

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