Badge/achievement system

The goal

In 2020 and 2021, we had an ad-hoc emoji system, special "moderator" tags, and various aesthetic rewards for solving puzzles. In 2022 we will potentially add a "badge" system, where people can unlock certain emoji for doing certain things, and then select which emoji to display by their name. This may unify these previously-disparate systems with a number of benefits:

Showing how to get certain emoji (both on mouseover when looking at someone else, and when viewing a list of badges) can incentivize people to explore
Having more badges than we had emoji gives people more ways to express themselves. It's like having a sticker area on a physical badge!
Provides a framework for designing puzzles that encourage teamwork
Provide completionists a more concrete goal to work towards over the event
Unifying emoji and aesthetic presentation at a technical level makes it easier to work with, and less likely for different content designers to step on each others' toes
Right now, people can "fake" emoji by just putting it in their display name. Eliminating that has positive and negative ramifications.

What concretely is it?

I think this is a few things:

Next to somebody's name, there are 2 slots (1? 3?) for emoji. When an emoji is displayed, mousing over it shows a tooltip indicating its name and/or how to acquire it
You can access a screen for your own emoji/achievements. It shows all possible badges, not just ones you've collected. Mousing over a badge shows how to acquire it (or show that always in a list, whatever makes sense). You can choose which badges are shown next to your name
We have an easy API to specify how certain badges should unlock in response to in-game actions
Badges can be built-in emoji, but we also support our own custom-designed pixel art emoji
The more badges the better. We can offer weird hard-to-get exclusive badges that require effort to obtain and let you show off, but giving people not driven by achievement to express themselves is equally important.

Open Questions

What does the UI look like for selecting your two badges? a. If 0 or 1 badges are selected, clicking a badge selects it. If 2 are selected, you must click a selected badge to unselect it before selecting another one. b. Clicking one of your two slots selects it. Clicking a badge then sets that badge to that slot. c. Current design thought: the ordering of emoji matters and can tell a story. (b) is more complicated than (a) in a way that I don't like, but preserves ordering as an explicit choice. d. Stretch goal: implement drag-and-drop as a optional UI
What are the badges? (See below)
How is the badge menu accessed? a. Gut instinct: if you view/edit your profile, there's a button to access the badge modal. If you click your own badges (or someone else's, maybe?) it opens the badge modal as well

Potential badges

Most of these will be defined as part of quest design. A general heuristic is "more badges is good". While we want some skill-based badges that require you to engage with "game-y" parts of the space, lots of badges useful for personal expression are great.

More general badges that might be good:

Speaker
Moderator
Multiple-year attendee (can we cross-reference this data somehow?)
Crafts: game designer, artist, programmer, musician, producer, fan, hobbyist, professional
Locations: continents? countries? popular cities?
Queer flags
Popular roguelikes you're a fan of: Nethack, ADOM, Qud, Dwarf Fortress, etc (a fun opportunity to bring in guest emoji designers)
Languages you speak other than English
D&D classes / Nethack classes / Alexei's procgen classes

Types of quest-based emoji:

This is a trivial thing to do in the space, but the achievement text describing it is cryptic
You visited a secret room!
You said a specific phrase!
You did a thing that required collaboration!
Some group of people did a group thing, and now everybody gets this emoji!
You collected every badge! (other than speaker/moderator)

Roguelike-Celebration / azure-mud