Developer's Code of Conduct

This document covers developers' rights, responsibilities, and rules for fair play.

If you are not a dev, check how to become a developer.

See Also: Users Code of Conduct.

Golden Rules

1. Respect your fellow developer and communicate through any issues you have civilly.
2. Make room for other developers to get a chance to work on games they like, in their own way.
3. Anyone can become a developer if they put in the effort.
4. All achievement sets are open for improvement.

Developers must do the following to keep in good standing:

• When planning to work on a new game, reserve it by announcing your plan to work on it in a new post.
• Only announce new plans when you are free of tickets.
• Keep your work free from unwelcome concepts.
• Use protective code, preventing potential cheating and exploits.
• Leave accurate code notes for each achievement condition you use.
• For set revisions, follow the revision policy.
• Resolve tickets and leave notes each time you do.
• Like a wiki, once you publish your work, you are giving it over to the community to be reviewed and reworked over time.

Developing a new achievement set

Before you begin working on a new achievement set go through the new achievement set checklist.

Reserving a game for achievement development

1. How to Reserve

The only way to reserve a game is by clearly stating your goal to create achievements in the official forum topic of the game on a new post.

• No other declarations, plans or lists posted anywhere else are to be considered in this.
• Code notes do not reserve a game (if you have added notes but not reserved the game in the forum, any other developer is free to work on it).
• It is recommended that post a list of planned achievements, so the community can review your work and give you feedback.

2. Concurrent Reservations Limit

As in the maximum number of achievement sets one developer can have reserved at once.

• Junior Developer: 1.
• Developer: 4.
• Veteran Developer: 8 (a Veteran Developer is someone who has Developer status for at least 18 months and has published at least 20 achievement sets).
• Note: Joining another developer in a cooperative effort does not reduce from this total.

3. Reservation Timing

• Only reserve a game for development when you start working on it. In other words, do not reserve games just to block others from working on it.
• Please reserve a set as soon as you begin working and not as you are finishing your work.

4. Reservation Renewals

You can renew your reservation every three months (+/- two weeks) if you have not finished your set.

• To renew a reservation, simply state that you are still working on a game in the its official forum topic. This must be a new post; editing your previous declaration is not a valid renewal.
• Avoid locking down a set indefinitely. If it appears a developer continues to delay development on a set with little or no progress, staff may intervene.
• Once a reservation has expired, the set is not available to be claimed by another developer until an admin has stated in the forum topic that the set is open for development. If you feel the declaration was overlooked, please contact RAdmin.

5. Respecting Reservations

• Do not ask, pressure or discourage anyone from working on any game, in public or in private (of course, assuming the person is already following all other standards on this Code of Conduct).

6. Reservation Cool-Down

Upon reserving a set, wait at least 24 hours before promoting it to core. This allows time for reservation review and to clear up any possible reservation disputes. If you believe a set is ready for core within 24 hours, an early promotion may be subject to approval.

Important Notes

• If you post a complete plan, be open to suggestions; you can get excellent input and suggestions this way.
• You must adhere to the Basic Achievement Design Guidelines, otherwise your set won't be allowed.
• When you publish your work you are giving it over to the community to be reviewed and reworked over time.

Collaboration

• Let others know if you welcome collaborators.
• If you've recently reserved a set and someone else voices desire to work on a set that you've reserved within the last 72 hours (beyond suggesting ideas), consider ways in which you can collaborate with them.
• If someone reserved a game you're interested in before you, don't get frustrated. You are encouraged to request collaboration. You can post your desire to collaborate in the forum or send them a message to get permission from them to publish your contributions. You can also wait and go through an Achievement Set Revision after the set is published.

Basic Achievement Design Guidelines

Unwelcome Concepts

You can (and should) be as creative as you can, but there are some concepts that are NOT welcome for achievements, such as:

1. Require Glitches/Bugs¹ (acceptable in Bonus sets).
2. Require two players (acceptable in "Multi" sets).
3. Require perfection all game (maybe acceptable in Bonus Sets).
4. Dying (simply), or playing bad without any purpose (acceptable for extra content like special cutscene).
5. NSFW content in text or image.
6. Achievements popping frequently with little effort from the player (including multiple achievements for doing the same task, such as one for beating a boss and another one for getting the item left by the boss, etc.)
7. Achievements obtainable with zero effort for no meaningful purpose (example: start the game as character X, collect one coin, watch a video). It's acceptable if there's something fun/historical/interesting you want to address.
8. Require excessive repetitive grinding, such as reaching level 99 in an RPG, for no meaningful purpose (maybe acceptable in Bonus Sets).
9. Rely entirely on randomness, especially when there are extremely low odds. However, for games where the randomness is a major aspect, it may be appropriate.
10. "Secret Achievements", where the players have no indication of what they're going after. If you want to prevent spoilers give at least a clue on the Achievement Title/Description. Otherwise the players will start to search on web or mess with Achievement Editor/Memory Inspector, and in the process they can stumble across even worse spoilers.
11. Sets for games that lack gameplay (videos, music visualizers, jukeboxes, etc.) won't be accepted without explicit approval. Approval will be handled via a vote by those with developer status on the Discord server, and requires implementation of sufficiently creative concepts. Book sets are still allowed, but must be worth 0 points.

1) Glitches/Bugs are errors within a game's code which often cause unintended behavior. Examples are memory overflow, incorrectly loaded levels, and clipping into objects.

Note: With every rule, there are exceptions. This is especially true with unwelcome concepts. All unwelcome concepts have some wiggle room, so when in doubt, consult with the admin team.

Every Achievement Set MUST Have

• All game page information filled out, and game images uploaded (if you're not a full-dev, send the images to the code-reviewers).
• Game Badges for each achievement (they don't need to be distinct from each other, just don't leave them blank).
• Content covering up to completion so long as the game can be beaten. Whether it be defeating the final boss, completing a first loop, or completing all puzzles, achievement sets that do not cover at least beating the game are deemed unfinished and therefore subject to demotion. Arcade-style games where the focus is on high scores (such as Pac-Man and Crystal Castles) are exempt from this rule.

Protection for situations where the players can get achievements without effort, such as:

1. Demo mode;
2. In-game cheat codes;
3. Battery saves;
4. Passwords.

See also: Achievement Templates and Real Examples for some well known protection techniques.

Recommended but not required

• Basic Rich Presence (only available for full-devs).
• Leaderboards for scores and time challenges (only available for full-devs).
• Missable achievements flagged, especially for RPGs and long games.
  • Use [m] in the end of achievement's title to flag it as missable.
• An achievement guide. Guides can be created and posted here.
• For games with text-triggered achievements (especially RPGs) it's recommend to find an event flag instead of hooking onto text or text ID. Text presentation varies between regional versions making multi-region support difficult.

Achievement Scoring

When scoring achievements match your scores to one of these 5 tiers. There is no achievement set point cap.

• 0-5 Easy / Minor Significance
• 10 Medium / Intermediate Significance
• 25 Hard / Major Significance
• 50 Very Hard / Completion Level Significance
• 100 Sadistic (Typically for bonus sets)

When scoring there are other factors to be considered, such as achievement spread and game length.

Tools to Help you Succeed

We have a roadmap you can use as a guideline to create a good achievement set.
We also have an achievement design guide on how to design good achievements, not the technical side but the conceptual. Creating a balanced set is one of the most difficult aspects of development, we have a set balance guide which will help you in thinking about how to create a set that flows.

It is preferable and recommended to work on one set at a time. But if you have more, be open for a teamwork or even delegate the set creation if another dev contacts you.

Revisions - Working on Sets with Existing Achievements

Revisions, as in working on a set that has existing achievements typically requires community approval by presenting your plan in the forum and in the #revision-voting channel in Discord. Not all changes need approval. See Achievement Set Revisions for details.

Code Notes

Leave accurate code notes for each address you use for achievement conditions. This helps you and others maintain the set, keeping it free of bugs.

You're free to add any code notes you discover to any set without declaring intentions to work on the game. Just be careful to not delete previous notes added by someone else.

Handling Tickets

After you've published achievements be prepared for bug reports.

You're expected to keep your work bug free by appropriately resolving tickets. Respond to all tickets as soon as possible. The sooner you respond the better, cause the problem is fresh in the player's mind and you can use them to help you to resolve the problem.

While resolving tickets, leave a brief summary of what you did. If you have an indication of false report leave a message showing what conclusions you've made, and then close the ticket. Closing/Resolving a ticket without leaving any comments is an unwelcome attitude.

Do not declare your plans to work on a game if you have open tickets.

If you want to resolve tickets or fix bugs on achievements made by another developer, it's always a good practice to try to contact them and check if they are still active before changing their work. An inactive developers is someone who have have 10 or more open tickets that are older than two months (you can see their open tickets from the Ticket Manager).

If the developer is active, you can assist them in the resolution.

If the developer is inactive you can freely resolve their tickets. However you're only allowed to fix the achievement to match the description; do not change the intention of the achievement without going through the revision process.

Developer Status Extended Inactivity

If a developer is inactive for two years or longer, meaning within two years they have not created any new achievements or resolved any incoming tickets, their developer status will expire.

If this happens to you, you are very welcome to come back to the scene if you want to create new content for our community. First you'll want to review and understand this document (the Developer Code of Conduct). When you feel ready to adhere to it, message us to user RAdmin (a shared admin mail account) here on site or speak to the admin or mod users on the RetroAchievements Discord server to check how to get your developer status back.

Achievement Ownership

When you publish your work you are giving it over to the community to be reviewed and reworked over time - see Achievement Set Revisions.

While the original developer does not own published achievements they are still the caretaker in terms of bug fixing and maintenance. If another developer revises the achievement they are the new caretaker of that achievement.

Feedback about the Developer Code of Conduct

Although the Developer Code of Conduct is the result of an intense debate, it's not an immutable document. If you have suggestions for improvements, contact us on our Discord server or send a message to RAdmin.

Changelog

Last 10 changes on this page:

• [2021-03-20 23:36] televandalist: Polishing. Fixed spelling/grammar/typos in a couple spots. Changed "Impossible" for 100-point tier to "Sadistic." since "Impossible" could be taken literally. Added third point to "4. Reservation Renewals."
• [2021-03-14 22:55] televandalist: Added a part about unfinished games in the section about what every set must have.
• [2021-01-19 10:23] Hotscrock: Updated Developers Code of Conduct (markdown)
• [2020-09-16 13:24] meleu: game art is mandatory, RPS is recommended
• [2020-06-19 10:12] Sanaki: Added unwelcome concept 11 (zero-effort sets) and noted that "watch a video" is part of unwelcome 7.
• [2020-05-30 01:47] SporyTike: Added glitch definition
• [2020-04-30 03:14] meleu: remove broken link
• [2020-04-29 21:34] televandalist: Update to "Reservation Cool-Down" - lowered the wait from a 48 hour minimum to a 24 hour minimum, with earlier promotions being subject to approval.
• [2020-04-28 01:17] SporyTike: Updated 'Unwelcome Concepts' with exceptions
• [2019-08-17 14:37] meleu: fix markdown formats