Since keeping track of progress and meeting goals is crucial for a physical/occupational therapy regimen, I wanted to make sure that there was a fun way to monitor how much time has been spent and how many goals and milestones the patient has achieved.
I figured to use the same system that keeps people coming back to videogames like world of warcraft, call of duty– providing microrewards, stat tracking and achievements!
After a lot of hand wringing and second guessing where the best place to store data would be, I got the achievements working. Currently the game lets you get an achievement (fired from one line of code in any particular game, so adding and removing achievements is a snap), it checks to see if you already have it unlocked, if not it shows the thing for 5 or ten seconds (I haven’t found the sweet spot for that yet) and adds it to your player profile. When you go back to look at your “progress” page with your user data, the new achievment shows up.
Since I’d planned to do this from the get-go, I had all the parts in place, and it ran fairly smoothly. Typically, I spent more time on formatting and making it look nice than actually building all the web of functions that would call, hide, show, and add to the profile data. I have to say, it’s kind of a thrill for me to unlock one of these things and see it show up in my player data window– I get a little thrill! The fun part will be making up as many goofy ‘cheevo names as I can come up with.
