iO’s long-standing unobtainable achievements could be fixed with help from TA member Vudix

Unless you’ve played the popular simulation game Turmoil on PC, Gamious is a name you may not have heard of until recently. The developer launched the relaxing narrative adventure game Lake earlier this month, but some of you, (probably a tiny minority) will remember the Dutch indie developer for another reason: iO and its two unobtainable achievements. The puzzle-platformer iO was released back in 2017, and players soon discovered that it had two unobtainable achievements. Looking back at some old TA forums, Itzz Sh0wt1m3 contacted Gamious at the time to see if the developer could fix the two busted achievements, but apparently, they couldn’t be fixed as the game was made in an old engine, and updates could only be rolled out in a new engine. However, a fix for the four-year-old game is potentially in the works, with a TA community member, Vudix, who I’m sure plenty of you know already, leading the charge. We spoke with both Pim Bouman, CEO of Gamious, and Vudix about how this all came to be.Bouman offers his “utmost sincerest apologies” for the broken achievements in iO and goes on to explain that while, on paper, a fix might look easy, it’s actually far from that. Bouman tells me that iO was born out of a game jam in the Netherlands. “It was a team of five people, and I was on the jury. I basically fell in love with the game concept of iO because I still think it’s very special and original and what Gamious is all about — original games and good gameplay.” Five people who had never met before, all programmers and no artists, created the physics-based platformer during the event. Bouman told the team that he wanted to bring the game to market, offering Gamious’ help. After some time, and Gamious eventually taking over development, iO made its way to Xbox. It wasn’t long before the TrueAchievements community picked up on the broken achievements and were soon contacting Gamious, asking for a fix. Unfortunately, for a number of reasons, including old versions of Unity and part of the game actually being built on a physics error within Unity itself, a fix wasn’t possible.“The game is built on a very old version of Unity,” Bouman says. “And when you want to fix things in Unity, and you import the old project into a new version of Unity, then a lot of stuff breaks, so it’s not just the one specific achievement that needs to be fixed, no, if you want to fix it, you basically have to spend weeks of fixing a game that is also now broken.” Interestingly, Bouman also explains that the mechanics of iO were built on a physics error in this old version of Unity, which was later patched, meaning that if Gamious was to revisit it, the entire base of the game and the way the controls of the ball worked would have to be completely rebuilt. Unfortunately, the game wasn’t performing well on Microsoft’s platform, and with Gamious being a small developer with few resources at the time, it shifted direction to work on Turmoil, a strategy game released on Steam that was seeing success. Naturally, this makes complete sense from a business perspective.“I feel really sorry for your entire community,” Bouman says. “I didn’t know it was such a big deal, but we are more than happy to fix it, except we just don’t have the development resources.” And this is where Vudix steps in. With Gamious arriving back on the scene with Lake, Bouman says he received a message from Vudix, offering to help with the broken achievements. Vudix got in touch with Bouman after seeing comments on TrueAchievements in one of the forums about Gamious not fixing iO’s unobtainables. After a bit of back and forth, with Vudix showing Pim screenshots of some of the discussions surrounding the game from TA’s forums, Vudix was asked about Unity. “This guy is a developer himself. One plus one equals two. I can send him the project, and he can maybe fix it,” Bouman said. Gamious has offered Vudix royalties from any future sales of the game once the fix is in place, but Vudix tells me he doesn’t think he’ll take the developer up on its offer, as to him, it’s not about that. It’s about getting achievements fixed, whether that’s offering developers and publishers his help directly or by giving them a prod and telling them that something is broken.Vudix says his achievement-fixing crusade has been going on for a while now, but things really started picking up when the community started getting involved with his TA thread, ‘Get Unobtainables Fixed.’ “Before that, everything I did was very private,” Vudix says. “And then I had this epiphany: If I communicate and show transparency, that’s 10,000 times better than just working on [achievement fixes] in the shadows. So I started ‘Get Unobtainbles Fixed’ and started actively taking community suggestions, working with people to get things fixed, and it’s been a monumental improvement.” According to Vudix, between 350 and 400 games have been fixed or actioned in some way since the thread. This includes small games from “one-man studios all the way to EA, The Coalition, and Insomniac Games.”Recently, Vudix teamed up with Achievement Initiative, a Discord group of dedicated achievement hunters who are trying to stamp out unobtainable achievements and get them fixed. “Dwaggienite, Angelsk, and Fire had a group chat on Discord where they wanted to introduce a policy change with Microsoft. I hopped in there, gave them my two cents, explained what was feasible and what wasn’t.” The Achievement Initiative Discord is so much more convenient, according to Vudix, and it certainly looks impressive. There is a dedicated channel for each game with an unobtainable achievement, where Vudix and other members discuss who to talk to get something fixed and test out games after they’ve been patched — it’s awesome to see so many people working together for the greater good. Vudix says he’s working with numerous studios to get achievements fixed but mentions Daedalic as one that’s currently top of the pile. “I’m doing a lot of work with Daedalic, and we’re working on hitting each title down the line, going through each game they have busted.“And that’s what I’m really working on now with studios. Instead of saying we’re going to work one project at a time, I go right into their face and say this is every single unobtainable you have for all of your games. Let’s start here and work our way down.” iOFor Daedalic, Vudix says a patch is coming soon for the unobtainable in Unrailed and that a patch that will fix Pumpkin Jack’s two busted achievements is also in the works and coming soon. Other studios that Vudix is working with include Microids and Toplitz Productions. Vudix tells me that this is all a hobby, something that he does in his time off when not working his three different jobs. For those waiting on a fix for iO, Vudix says he’s aiming to start working on the game in October or November and will try to have a patch roll out sometime in December. “I need to get in there and see exactly what has been messed up, check some things, and just make sure the other achievements work correctly.” Vudix goes on to say that he might add in a title update with nods to some of the TrueAchievements community who have been waiting so long for a fix. “I want to add a title update, just to give back to some of the people that have been waiting, but not anything crazy like a Xitilon update, but something that’s a healthy amount. Maybe a thousand Gamerscore, but it will be something realistic, and something earned.”Keep an eye on the TA homepage for more on iO and Vudix’s fix in the coming months.



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