DEV Community: Travis Elkins

Get your streak on...!

Travis Elkins — Fri, 09 Apr 2021 12:24:58 +0000

Get your streak on...! 🚀

While this feature wasn't considered necessary for r4nkt's initial release, it was always considered a must-have. Well, over the last week, initial support for streaks has been deployed to production. This makes it very easy for you to define achievement criteria in terms of streaks.

We are very excited to have rolled this functionality out and hope that you and your users will enjoy the new possibilities that are now available.

What are streaks? 🤔

In terms of r4nkt achievement criteria, a streak is when a player has performed some sort of action(s) over a consecutive series of time intervals. Some examples:

A salesperson has closed at least one sale for 10 days in a row.
A student has passed the daily quiz 5 days in a row.
A user has walked at least 100 steps 8 hours in a row.

How does it work? 😯

R4nkt's streaks are defined on the individual criteria. The criterion resource has a new property: streak. Like similar properties, it takes a string that matches the following pattern: interval:amount.

The interval can be one of the following:

days
hours

Both require an amount, which indicates the number of days or hours that the streak should be.

So, if we take some of the examples from above, we can see how easy it is to define streaks:

days:10: 10 days in a row.
days:5: 5 days in a row.
hours:8: 8 hours in a row.

Very simple and straightforward...! 🤓

Take it to the next level

For many, the basic use of streak criteria will be sufficient, but when you combine them with criteria conditions and custom data references, then you can really start to come up with very complex and interesting achievements. There are so many possibilities...! 😃

Imagine that you develop an e-learning application or service and your students are allowed to take a daily quiz. You could define an achievement for students that pass the daily quiz by 95% or more for three straight days.

To do so, you would need your achievement, which we'll call The Triple, your primary criteria group, and a single criterion.

You'll also have an action, which might be called Pass Quiz and give a custom ID of pass.quiz. You will report it whenever a player passes a quiz. And, you'll want to pass the result in the activity's custom data, like so:

"custom_data": {"result": 97}

Then, your criterion will have the following properties:

custom_action_id: pass.quiz
rule: gte:1
streak: days:3

These properties let r4nkt know that the criterion is met when the player has passed at least one quiz each day for three (or more) consecutive days.

But what if they don't get a result of 95 or more...?

Well, that's where criteria conditions come into play. For this scenario, you'll have a criteria condition on either your criteria group or your criterion with the following definition:

"conditions": {
    "groups":  [
        {
            "conditions":  [
                "activityData:result,gte,95"
            ]
        }
    ]
}

So, by defining the activityData criteria condition, you make sure that only activities that have a custom data result of 95 or greater will be considered. This is applied and then the criterion's rule and streak are considered. That is, once all "Pass Quiz" activities for the player that did not meet the criteria conditions (result >= 95) have been filtered out, then r4nkt will look to see if at least one such activity exists per day for three (or more) consecutive days.

That's pretty great, don't you think. 😜

I want to learn more

You can check out our ever-improving documentation or you can also join our Discord server and ask for help or make suggestions. ⚡️

Coming Soon

There are still more streak-related features that are in the pipeline. Obviously, we're going to expand the available time intervals and you will soon have the ability to define streaks in terms of the following time intervals:

weekly
monthly
yearly
minutely...? 😜

More may be added, but we'll allow your needs to drive those efforts. 🤓

If you want to be notified when these new features are added, if you'd like to suggest one, or if you'd just like to be kept abreast of what we're doing, then follow us on twitter. We'll keep you posted. 😎

Open for Business

Travis Elkins — Thu, 04 Mar 2021 18:28:19 +0000

Today, after a couple of months of testing and research, r4nkt officially opened up for business. That is to say, plans and their major features were selected, pricing was determined, and the site was updated as such.

In selecting plans, we wanted the differences between them to be as few as possible and to be something that made sense for the customer as well as for r4nkt.

Initially, we looked at imposing limits on the various gamification resources. R4nkt has resources like achievements, rewards, leaderboards, and players. This seemed like an easy place to start. But, any limits that were selected seemed somewhat arbitrary and very likely to be a bad fit for a lot of potential customers. Some customers might want to define a lot of achievements or maybe they have a lot of players, but they wouldn't actually expect to see much in terms of player activity. Other customers might just want to define a few achievements, for example, but would expect to see a great deal of player activity. So, customers like these would have to pay a lot more for what they would be getting, in terms of features, than they would actually need or use. Or, at a minimum, they might feel this way, and that is something we would rather avoid at r4nkt.

Over and over again, however, we kept coming back to the number of API requests as a way to measure usage. This seemed to translate quite well for us in determining price and for the customer in determining which plan to use. It seemed much more natural for our anticipated customers, too, in a way where each customer seemed more likely to feel like they could make a great choice for their particular project.

It's true that some customers might define a massive amount of resources, but we have some reasonable limitations on the big "resource hogs", which are r4nkt's action triggers and nested criteria groups.

The only other aspect that we considered worth using as a distinction between plans was the number of team members that one could have. All subscriptions are team-based, but we thought it made sense to limit the lesser-priced plans to fewer team members than the greater-priced plans. Our conclusion from the feedback we received is that customers that anticipated a higher amount of player activity also had a greater interest in support for larger teams. Those that anticipated a lower amount of player activity didn't have the same kind of interest when it came to team member limitations.

So, the other side of this coin has to do with costs, of course. At a high level, r4nkt's costs come from usage, which is primarily from storage and compute time. After observing how the service is used, determining the costs on a per-request basis was relatively straightforward. And so, without getting into details, it was a simple matter of basic mathematics to calculate our anticipated costs, which then pointed us to where we should be looking to set our prices. Coupled with a few other factors, some concrete plans started to emerge...plans that we were confident would be good for our customers, good for r4nkt, and easy to understand for everyone.

A final point to make has to do with the future. R4nkt has an obvious interest in staying in business, as well as a goal of making good sense to its customers. A fair price will always be charged, but that doesn't mean that there can't be flexibility in how it delivers its services.

R4nkt will continue to look at usage and costs. R4nkt will continue to listen to our customers' feedback and suggestions. We will make adjustments going forward to our plans, but they will always -- hopefully -- be clear, simple, and fair. R4nkt will always be good value for money.

Check out r4nkt. Follow us on Twitter. Let us know what you think. 🤓

(Originally posted at https://www.indiehackers.com/product/r4nkt/open-for-business--MUyRHYgpS6pxmHTOCH0)

Improved Gamification: Two New Criteria Conditions

Travis Elkins — Tue, 16 Feb 2021 16:17:52 +0000

We just published a couple of simple blog posts for r4nkt describing two new criteria conditions. Check them out:

If you're wondering what criteria conditions are, they are a simple way that r4nkt allows you to define the criteria that must be met in order for achievements to be earned in your game or app.

R4nkt has over a dozen individual criteria conditions that you can use. We will continue to add to the list.

Combining and nesting criteria conditions and rules gives you a great deal of possibilities when it comes to defining your achievements. It's just one of the things that sets r4nkt apart. 😎

We also have plans to introduce the ability to use your own custom data in rules and conditions, which will dramatically expand the kinds of criteria you can define for your achievements. 🤯

What will r4nkt do for you and your app?

Travis Elkins — Tue, 22 Dec 2020 11:41:47 +0000

If you're a developer who has thought about introducing gamification features into your app or website, you will want to take a look at r4nkt.

Check this article out for a bit more insight into what a service like r4nkt can do for you.

https://r4nkt.com/blog/what-will-r4nkt-do-for-you

R4nkt gamification resources: ready to help you add value to your app

Travis Elkins — Fri, 11 Dec 2020 13:47:06 +0000

This article hopes to give readers a better understanding of r4nkt, and therefore a clearer picture of how you can easily add value to your game or application.

How can r4nkt benefit you?

If you don't yet know why or how gamification can bring value to your app, check out our short blog post.

R4nkt's gamification resources

If you're wondering what gamification resources r4nkt gives you out of the box, read on...or visit our gamification resources feature page.

Here are some of r4nkt's various gamification resources:

Achievements

Achievements are one of the central concepts in r4nkt. You create achievements that your players can earn. You assign points, attach rewards, and define the criteria that must be met in order to earn them. Once earned, your player is awarded a badge, points are automatically distributed, and you receive notification of the event.

Leaderboards

Leaderboards provide ways to keep track of player rankings in different ways. There are currently two types of leaderboards:

Standard leaderboards automatically keep track of players' rankings according to the achievement points they have earned.
Custom leaderboards allow you to track your players' scores in whatever way you wish.

For a single game, there's really no need for more than one standard leaderboard, since it's tied directly to your players' achievement points. But, custom leaderboards give you an opportunity to measure whatever you want, however you want. You submit scores to custom leaderboards for your players and r4nkt takes care of the rest.

For all leaderboards, rankings are managed for the following time spans:

all-time
daily
weekly
monthly
yearly

Actions

Actions represent things that your players can do within your application or game. They are in many ways one of the more fundamental building blocks of your r4nkt game. An action is something that your player can do that you find interesting. It is something you want to encourage, measure, reward, and/or otherwise use as some sort of criteria for earning achievements.

Some examples of actions:

close a sale
solve a problem
submit an article
slay a red dragon

Actions are then used together with criteria to define what must be done in order to earn an achievement. Player actions then are submitted to r4nkt whenever they are performed in your application. Again, r4nkt takes over and processes this new activity to see if any achievements have been earned, notifying you of any subsequent badges having been awarded to your player.

Players

Simply put, players are your users. You report the actions they perform and r4nkt notifies you whenever those actions result in earning an achievement.

Badges

Badges are awarded to your players whenever an achievement is earned. If configured properly, you will be notified of this event so that you can inform your player and distribute any attached rewards. Points associated with the badge's related achievement will be automatically added to the player's total points and your game's standard leaderboard rankings will be updated.

Another way to think of badges is that they are records of your players' achievements. Each badge is a record of the achievement it represents, the player that has earned the achievement, and the number of points that were awarded.

Criteria

These simple-yet-important resources allow you to define different ways to measure your players' activities. They can be reused in different ways in multiple criteria groups and across achievements.

Essentially, a criterion is a resource that has the following properties:

action
threshold
operator

You define a criterion by providing values for these three properties, allowing r4nkt to know when a criterion has been met. For example, if you have the following properties set:

action: make a sale
threshold: 10
operator: greater-than-or-equal-to

Then r4nkt knows that the criterion has been met when your player has made at least 10 sales.

Rewards

Rewards are attached to achievements and give you another way to reward your players. They can be anything you like:

award points to a custom leaderboard
fire off an order to Amazon for a gift card
send an email to someone in HR to hand-deliver a weekend getaway package

The possibilities are endless.

Scores

You submit player scores for custom leaderboards. Better scores are kept and rankings are automatically updated and maintained for various time spans:

all-time
daily
weekly
monthly
yearly

Scores, of course, are used to determine a players' rankings within a given leaderboard.

Criteria Groups

A criteria group is a reusable collection of criteria that must be met in order for an achievement to be earned. They may contain individual criteria or even other nested criteria groups.

An achievement must have a criteria group with at least one criterion in order to be earned. By creating various combinations of criteria and criteria groups, including nesting criteria groups, complex achievements can be defined.

Summary

Together, you can use all of these resources to add an exciting dimension to your new or existing application. You can promote behavior, measure activity, reward exceptional accomplishments, provide an element of fun for your users, and more.

For a bit more detail, visit our documentation.

Interested...?

R4nkt.com, is ready for some interested developers/companies to take the service for a spin...for free...!

We believe the service is ready, but want one last round of real-world testing to make sure...ironing out any wrinkles and addressing any unexpected pain points.

Follow r4nkt on Twitter, sign up for beta access on our website, or read a bit more on our blog.

Looking for an easy gamification solution...?

Travis Elkins — Thu, 10 Dec 2020 12:25:59 +0000

Do you want to gamify your app?

Would you like to enjoy some of the benefits that gamification can bring to your or your users?

Would you like to save time and money to get a rich set of gamification features?

If you said, "Yes", to any of these questions, then you will want to take a look at r4nkt.com.

What is r4nkt...?

R4nkt is a drop-in service that makes introducing gamification to your application easy. It is meant to be used via API, which means that it is platform-agnostic. It looks to handle as much of the heavy lifting of gamification as possible, currently supporting many common gamification features that will add value to your application.

Features

Some of its high-level features include:

Platform-agnostic: Once a r4nkt game is created, it can be managed and used via API from any platform that can make HTTP requests.
Standard gamification resources: Define your own achievements and the actions and criteria required to earn them. Create and use different kinds of leaderboards for different purposes.
Quality of life improvements: Features like reactions and achievement stacks aim to improve the quality of life for r4nkt developers.
Language/Framework Packages: We currently have a PHP SDK and a Laravel package to help get up to speed more quickly. More will be added as time allows and need/interest dictate.
Flexible admin options: Use the API or our Laravel Nova-based GUI admin tool.
Secure: All connections are secure and data is protected.
Powerful backend: Powered by AWS.
Respects privacy: R4nkt does not collect your users' personal data...at all.

What now...?

R4nkt is ready to be opened up to a few people who are in a position to "kick its tires", so to speak. We are hoping for feedback that will help us iron out wrinkles, address any unforeseen pain points or missing functionality, and determine near-future feature development.

Interested...?

So...if you're interested, please visit us online to register your email address with us or follow us and let us know via Twitter. We will be in touch with you after that.

You can also read a little more on our blog.

Thanks...! We're looking forward to working with you.