Newgrounds Achievements and Highscore

So I uploaded the game to Newgrounds, once again it got a lot of attention (it even got front paged!)

Using the experience from my previous upload I anticipated a lot of issues players might have, and I also added achievements and a leader-board! 

For those wondering how to do this, it's fairly easy, you can read all about it here, but the gist of it is that you have to set up every achievement (or Medal, as they are called on Newgrounds) and Scoreboard on the game API Tools settings, and once it's done, you have to make it so that your game sends an HTTP request to the Newgrounds API, since I used Godot to make the game, I used this code (shout-out to 3p0ch!), it was pretty straight forward.

Your game has an ID and an Encryption Key it needs in order for the requests to be "accepted" by Newgrounds, you can view them on your game's settings, I took the precaution to only include these in the build and not on the GitHub repository of the game itself, which is public.

(the sensitive folder is listed in .gitignore)

Whenever an achievement is completed, I call this function

(the id_map maps every achievement's name to its Newgrounds ID)

And that's it! 

If you have a browser game you think is worth playing and it's sitting gathering dust on itch, I encourage you to also upload it to Newgrounds, either as-is or with the above added API tools which add replayability.

The difference in attention it will get is honestly amazing.

Stats after uploading this game to itch more than 6 months ago:

Stats after uploading this game to Newgrounds yesterday

You don't need to publicize, have a social media presence, or even tell anyone at all that you are publishing a game for a group of strangers to try it, and that blows my mind lol. 

I figure it makes sense, as Newgrounds is way more popular among gamers than gamedevs, and it's mostly in-browser stuff, while itch is more tailored to game developers and it covers a wider variety of gaming content.

Right now the way I go about both platforms is something like this: 

• I upload EVERYTHING I make to itch, including prototypes and insultingly incomplete stuff
• I upload ONLY THE POLISHED STUFF to Newgrounds

I might try other platforms in the future, I know there's a lot of browser gaming websites, I tried uploading my previous game to Crazygames (got rejected lol), miniplay/minijuegos (never got my request for gamedev access past pending approval), and a few others, but so far none of them were as permissive or welcoming as Itch and Newgrounds.

Thought it'd be cool to share.

Cheers!