Well, actually, just your help :P
Yes, this blog is about *. Yes, yet again. In fact, all my blogs (or pretty much all of them) will be about this. Now, I know that it can be construed as tooting my own horn, but it's actually for the game's sake rather than my self-centeredness. You see, I have a gigantic problem with not finishing my games, and I'm of the idea that unless I'm actually PRODUCING something (you know, finishing stand-alone projects), this whole hobby is wasting my time. To help this, I'm trying several things. I'll use the "Projects" feature in this website to keep a list of things to do so that I actually see my progress, and I'll keep talking about it so that I keep in contact with you peeps. Due to this, I'd really like it if there were a few of you who kept giving me feedback on my ideas. All in the name of me FINISHING SOMETHING, GODDAMNIT!If a few dedicated people who haven't played * and would really like to help me, I highly suggest downloading it and playing so that you have an idea of what I'm saying. Again, it's not a shameless plug to get people to download the game, although it may seem that way :PI realized something extremely annoying with the game. I intentionally made it so that if you click ANYWHERE in the screen, 1 health point is subtracted. To be honest, I have absolutely no idea what the hell was going through my head when I decided that. It's simply too punishing, and it places a heavy emphasis on being accurate as to where you're clicking, because you lose 1 health point if you aim to click on an sphere and somehow miss (happens a lot in higher levels). My goal of the game isn't to make some sort of "shooting range" that punishes you if you're not accurate with the mouse, so I have no idea why I decided to implement that. Instead, 1 health point will ONLY be subtracted if you actually succeed in destroying a sphere.Another thing I've thought about is the high score system. Now, originally I made it so that only the level you finished at would determine your place in the high score. I did this because the scoring in the game can be modified heavily in the shop with all the spending of items and selling health to get more points. In essence, you could technically be at level 30, but spend so much that your score will be less than one of level 28. So scoring really didn't determine your success at the game, but level sort of did (you could still alter it by buying that "Level up" item, but it really didn't alter the system that much).Now, with my "Start at level ___" system that I want to implement, the level you're at won't be able to determine your success at the game, so that'll be thrown out too. Now, I COULD make it so that a combination of both scoring and level determines success, but then I'll have to come up with some crazy equation that'll definitely make the game unbalanced in some way.An idea just came into my head, actually. I could make it so that the number of orbs destroyed (regardless of score. Just the pure raw number) determines success. I'm not so sure if that can work out, because it definitely is going to place an emphasis on destroying as many orbs as possible, and we all know that clicking everywhere gets you a nice big Game Over in like 2 minutes.So I'm really just asking you wonderful readers. How should I rank the players' performance? Should I make some complicated combination, or can you think of some simpler way? I'm really open to your ideas here.
Success = Orbs*Levels/max(1,Points)
I will talk about your first paragraph.
Hmm, those things really don't help. I have the same problem, and 64Digits really doesn't help much. In fact, writing blogs and stuff at 64Digits is an act of procrastination.I remember before last summer you talked about making 3 games or something, as the last thing you would do before quitting GM, I think that's what you said?Where are those games?HmmI've had the same problem since 2005, and the only thing I've found out is that I can't move my ass alone to work on projects, I must have someone else to tell me what exactly to do. And 64Digits doesn't work well as that someone else.Now, the rest of the blogI haven't tried your game, I will try it now =)Juju, your suggestion actually sprouted an idea off my head. Thing is, I'd like the player to know how well they're doing, and the game really doesn't lend itself to giving the player enough time to multiply orbs destroyed times levels, and divide by points :P
Regardless, I've thought that I would have to make a combination inevitably, so I'll try out what you said, make THAT the score, and call the value that was called "score" in the previous game some other name (like "* Points" or something).I think I've bumped into a nice system to determine success. That way, the score won't be directly affected. The only thing is that I'd have to decide if the new scoring should be affected by how many points you have. I mean, should it be conceivable that spending "* Points" actually decreases your score, or just set it so that it increases your score, but never decreases it? I think I'll go for the latter, but I'll see how it works out in practice.Josea, I'm just trying out random things and see what hits. I personally get cravings to work on games if I keep talking about them, so it might help. And yes, that last-three-games deal didn't work out for various reasons. It's OK, though. I always had a feeling that it would happen :PThe reason as to why I want feedback is also due to the fact that feedback was actually useful to me in the previous game, although it came obviously too late. When people wrote reviews, I often thought "Dang it! That's a good idea! Why didn't I think of it before?", and that's because I didn't talk to anyone about * at all. I think opening up a channel of feedback and suggestions will go a long way in the design of the game. As you can see, Juju already gave me a pretty good idea :P