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TLDR: R4nkt handles as much of the heavy lifting of gamification as possible. If you want gamification, you can do it on your own or you can do it with r4nkt. In either case, there are some things that you will have to do no matter what. R4nkt tries to do everything that it can, leaving you to only focus on the part that no one else could do for you, anyway.

R4nkt provides a way to introduce gamification features into an app, website, or game. Think about achievements, for example. As a r4nkt customer, you would define your game's achievements along with the various actions that can be performed by your players.

NOTE: R4nkt refers to a game as the app/website/game/whatever that you integrate r4nkt into. Your players are its users.

Actions are whatever you find interesting....behavior that you want to measure, encourage, reward, etc. They can be things like submit an article, post a comment, close a sale, slay a dragon, solve a particularly difficult riddle, complete a level, etc. It's anything that a player can do that you find interesting.

You then define the various criteria required to earn each achievement. This is done by combining criteria and actions. An example might be to create a criterion linked to your "invite a friend" action with its operator set to "greater-than-or-equal-to" and its threshold set to 10. In order for this criterion to be met, your player must "invite a friend" 10+ times. You can then attach this criterion to a new achievement and you're ready to go.

Once all of your actions, criteria, achievements, etc are configured, then you simply report your players' actions via r4nkt's API. Player 1 invited a friend. Player 2 commented on a post. Player 1 invited a friend. And so on....

Each time you report activity, r4nkt will determine whether or not your player has earned any achievements. If so, your game will be notified. You can then notify your player. If any rewards are attached, then you can distribute them.

Also, if you have a standard leaderboard set up, then any achievement points that have been earned for your player will automatically be allocated and the leaderboard will be updated, keeping rankings for all your players for all-time rankings as well as daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly.

There's more...and there's more to come. But, hopefully that gives you a better idea of what r4nkt does for you.

With or without r4nkt, you will likely want to have achievements. This is easy. R4nkt provides a way to define simple or complex criteria (by combining criteria, criteria groups, and nested criteria groups)...which can then be attached to achievements...and reused.

With or without r4nkt, you will also likely want to have leaderboards. This is also easy, but r4nkt takes it further by automatically updating standard leaderboards according to earned achievement points, automatically handling rankings for different time-spans, and for minimizing the possibility of ties. It also gives you the ability to create custom leaderboards to submit player scores however you need/want.

With or without r4nkt, you will also likely need to track a user's actions to determine whether or not various criteria have been met in order to earn an achievement. This is an area where r4nkt really helps out. All your code needs to do here is simply report the activity and listen for any notifications. You don't need to worry about keeping track of activity or considering complex criteria. You just focus on reporting interesting actions and leave the rest to r4nkt.

There's more, as I said, and there's more to come. As I mentioned in another comment, there are plans to eventually add in support for clans/teams/guilds, challenges, progress (as mentioned before), friends/enemies, batch operations, different kinds of criteria, session-based achievements, quality of life improvements, etc.

So, I hope that this helps give you a better understanding of how r4nkt works and what it can do for you. Whatever the case, please let me know if you have further questions.

I think I'll take some of this and re-work it into a blog post. I'm sure you're not the only one who has such questions. 🤓

Thanks for checking it out and posting some feedback. Much appreciated. 😁

TLDR: R4nkt vs in-house. It all boils down to return on investment (ROI). You get quite a bit with r4nkt for a relatively low cost. You may or may not get more building in-house, but it will likely cost more in the short- and long-term. ⚖️

There are a multitude of potential gamification features, as it seems you know. R4nkt offers what I like to call an action-driven achievement system. Actions are defined and combined together with user-defined criteria to define achievements. It's easy enough to show progress-related information with simple achievements...that is, those that have a fixed set of criteria that must be accomplished in order to earn an achievement.

For example, submit 10 articles is easy enough because you can measure a very clear progress for any given "player". But, r4nkt allows very complex achievements. A single achievement can have multiple criteria along with nested groups of criteria, each with its own way of determining if the player has met the criteria or not.

Think about an achievement that requires the player meets one set of criteria or another set of criteria or a third set of criteria. And any one of those sets might have its own little hierarchy of criteria. These kinds of achievements make it difficult to measure progress.

As such, achievement progress is not a part of r4nkt MVP....but it is something that will likely appear for achievements that meet certain criteria...no pun intended. 😂

So....I'm sharing this information in part to help answer your question: "How's it better to use r4nkt (damn, what a name) vs. building in-house?"

Building in-house almost always allows you to focus on getting exactly the features that you want. There's more to it and I am now thinking of making your question the base of a blog post. 😂

Anyway, the downside is that you're responsible...for everything. All of the time to develop, test, and maintain falls on the developer's/company's shoulders.

Using r4nkt means that you get its feature set. But, you don't have to develop, test, or maintain it. Just like any other service, you get all that taken care of for a reasonable monthly/yearly fee.

There's a trade-off, of course, either way you go. 😜

The thing about r4nkt is that one of its main goals is to remove as much of the heavy lifting from the developer/company as possible. The developer/company defines the achievements and the actions/criteria that are needed to meet the criteria. Then, their players' activities are reported and r4nkt does the work to figure out if any achievements have been earned. Setting up a default leaderboard means that achievement-related rankings are automatically kept for each day, week, month, and year, as well as for all time. Custom leaderboards can be created and scores can be posted for your players however/whenever you like...and, again, rankings will be automatically kept in the same way as before.

Looking forward (in no particular order), r4nkt will offer clans/teams/guilds, challenges, progress (as mentioned before), friends/enemies, batch operations, different kinds of criteria, session-based achievements, quality of life improvements, and more. So, you may want/need some of those things.

So, I guess in the end, it's better to use r4nkt if you feel like it gives you the better ROI. Stick with the in-house build if you feel that gives you the best ROI.

LOL! Sorry for the long-winded response. Hopefully I've answered your question. Let me know if there's anything else you want to ask/say. 🤓

Thanks for the positive feedback...! 😁

R4nkt is mostly built using what some call the TALL stack: Tailwind CSS, Alpine JS, Laravel, and Livewire. 🤓

It runs on an AWS-powered infrastructure, so it's solid, fast, and scalable. 💪

Oh...and there's a dash of nerd-infused feelz.... 😜

Let me know if you have any other questions. 🤓