Introduction to Challenge

Last updated on December 17, 2024

Overview​

The AccelByte Gaming Services (AGS) Challenge service elevates the gaming experience for your players across various genres by enabling you to create and tailor challenges based on your game's immersive story or strategic gameplay. The Challenge services enables you to provide your players a set of objectives for them to achieve, which enhances player retention. You can also use challenges to drive revenue opportunities for your platform or game.

This article provides a high-level summary of the key concepts of the Challenge service. For a more detailed breakdown of how challenges work and configured in AGS with sample configurations, see How challenges work in AGS.

Key concepts​

This section contains a deep dive into the concepts and use cases of the Challenge service.

Challenge basic information​

You must provide the following basic information when creating or configuring a challenge.

  • Challenge name: UI-friendly name of the challenge, which is visible to your players in-game. For example:

    • Winter Challenge
    • Sunrise Sign-in
    • Daily Missions

  • Challenge description: (optional) provides more information or describes a challenge. For example:

    • Log in every day to unlock exclusive rewards.
    • Embrace the chill with winter weekly missions! Only this winter!

  • Challenge code: unique human-readable identifier that your developers can use to retrieve a specific challenge from the game. For example:

    • winterchallenge
    • sunrisesignin

Challenge period​

You can set the period of the challenge that you configure. There are two options that you can choose for the challenge period.

  • Time-based: you can schedule the challenge to only be active in a specific period of time. This restricts players to only make progress, complete challenge goals, and claim rewards within the specified time frame. For example:

    • Winter Challenge starts on December 24, 2023 at 12:00 A.M. UTC and ends on February 28, 2024 at 12:00 A.M. UTC.
    • Sunrise Sign-in Challenge starts on March 1, 2023 and ends on Dec 31, 2023

  • Always active: the challenge will run without ending or will always be available in your game, unless you disable or delete it. This allows players to make progress, complete challenge goals, and claim rewards at any time.

Challenge statuses​

There are three statuses for challenges:

  • INIT: The challenge has not started yet (or its start date has not passed). Admins can still edit or delete the challenge configuration as well as add goals.
  • TIED: The challenge has started. This status only allows the admins to accelerate or stop the challenge. Goals cannot be edited or added to ensure gameplay and configuration integrity.
  • RETIRED: The challenge has expired. Participating players can no longer make progress in the challenge. Admins cannot modify the configuration.

The specific data that can be edited for a challenge depends on its current status and goal configurations, as detailed below:

  • When an INIT challenge has goal configurations, only its name, description, and goal visibility settings can be edited. This restriction safeguards the established goals and their associated schedules from disruptions due to changes in rotation, assignment rules, etc.
  • When an INIT challenge does not contain any goal configurations, all of its data can be modified, excluding the challenge code.

Goals rotation​

You can set specific rotation rules for each goal in a challenge as follows:

  • Rotation type

    • With rotation: goals will be rotated based on your specified rotation. The available options are Daily, Weekly, Monthly, and Custom number of days. For example, a daily rotation sets your goals to be rotated everyday, which means that in the following day, your players will have new goals to complete. Players are encouraged or required to complete it within a 24-hour period. After that, the goals will be reset or replaced with other goals.
    • None: the challenge goals are fixed and can be completed by players at any time within the challenge's active period.

  • Rotation repetition: you can configure the repetition of the rotation, allowing you to repeat the same cycle again after a period of time. This is applicable to the following sample scenarios:

    • As a game developer, I want to have a daily mission, in which each day of the week, the players will have different goals to complete, and the goals cycle will reset to the beginning after a week.
    • As a game developer, I want to have a Seasonal Challenge with a fixed weekly schedule that will be looped every month.

Goals assignment​

Assignment rules only apply to goals that are in a challenge with rotation (see Goals rotation). With this option, you have to set the assignment period of goals when you create or edit them. You can set the assignment of your goals as follows:

  • Fixed assignment: you need to manually select which goals to assign to players in each rotation period or cycle. For example:

    • Daily login: a fixed goal that runs for seven days which is looped every week.

  • Randomized assignment: you will rely on the Challenge service to randomly select which goals to assign to players in each rotation period or cycle. With this option, you will only need to add the goals into the challenge. Sample scenarios:

    • You've created 33 goals in a challenge and you want the Challenge service to randomly select three goals to assign to players each week.
    • You've created 100 goals in a challenge and you want the Challenge service to randomly select two goals to assign to players each day.

Goals and rewards​

Goals are tasks or activities that players are expected to accomplish in order to claim the associated reward. You can add multiple goals in a single challenge and assign to a specific time period or rotation only if you configure a challenge with rotation. When creating goals, you have to set the following:

  • Requirements: each goal configuration will have requirements for the player to complete. Requirements will use player attributes or actions for the data that will be compared with the target value that is set. The Challenge service supports various conditions such as player attributes (user statistics value, achievement, etc.) or player action (player login activity, purchase activity, player publish UGC, etc). For example:

    • Kill 10 enemies.
    • Get three headshots and two assist.
    • Kill seven monsters or destroy three towers.
    • Log in at least once a day.

    For a full list of the available requirements that you can use in AGS, see Supported requirements for challenge goals.

  • Rewards: each goal configuration must also have at least one reward associated with it, which can be entitlements or statistics. Once a player completes the goal, they can obtain the associated reward. For example:

    • Two Purple Berry and 250 XP
    • One Wizard Mushroom
    • Five Iron Ore and Three Steel

Goal statuses​

There are four statuses for goals:

  • NOT STARTED: Indicates that the goal has not assigned to the player. To initiate the goal, the Challenge service evaluates the player'’'s eligibility based on their progress. If the player's progress makes them eligible, the goal becomes ACTIVE. Unassigned goals will also appear as NOT STARTED, especially when the challenge goal visibility is set to Show All. For more information about the player progression update and evaluation process, refer to the Manual and Auto-Update of Player Progression Data section in the Supported requirements for challenge goals page.
  • ACTIVE: Indicates that the goal has been assigned to the player and is currently in progress. Players can work towards completing the goal requirements during this phase.
  • COMPLETED: Indicates that the player has completed all the requirements of the goal. Upon completion, players are eligible to claim any associated rewards. Additionally, any completed goal that is past their active period will still be marked as COMPLETED, and player will still be able to claim any unclaimed rewards.
  • RETIRED: Indicates that the goal is past their active period without being completed by the player. Once a goal is retired, no further progress can be made.

Next steps​

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