Tag Info

I find myself most satisfied when I see what appear at first glance to be prime numbers. If the score always just adds a 0 (10, 20, 50, 200, 300 etc.) at the end, I feel cheated. Multiples of 5 (5, 25, 45, 80, 95 etc.) are a bit better, but you quickly catch on to the fact that your accomplishment is worth 1/5 of what's being shown. Numbers like 47, 76, ...

I would say the main reason why some games use such high numbers is, because they don't want to deal with fractions. "0.375 Experience Points" just isn't as catchy as "375 Experience Point". Those numbers have a wider range and variation for balancing without the need of fractions. The developer can still decide later in a patch to use 1015 points as damage ...

Preamble: As Patrick Hughes noted, for the "correct" answer to your question, take a sample of test playes. Give one group your game with standard scores, and a second group the same game but with 100x/1000x the scores. Fractions: Depends on your Game, really. Commenter Joe provided an example of where rounding can occur, but that's about Hit Points rather ...

To do this, your game has to keep track of the previous nodes clicked by the player, and check the sequence for the combos that you care about. The usual approach is to just keep adding things to your record of what the player has done until they break the combo chain (however your game defines that), at which point you clear the record and start over ...

Several points: You should definitely enable error reporting and error logging into a file on the PHP side, otherwise you'll have no evidence of problems. AJAX errors usually cause little visible error to the user. You should check for errors on the Javascript side too PHP error handling is famous for being both bad (e.g. the default action for most ...

I think this is a place where a power function may be ideal. If the best score S is achieved with N manipulators, you can have N+1 manipulators yield a score of S * 0.9 (ie. 90% of the best score), then N+2 manipulators yield S * 0.81 (ie. 90% of 90% of the best score), and so on. This is generalised by the following formula: score(num_manip) = S * ...

I'd say higher numbers tend to make players happy. It's better to get $1000 instead of $10, right? Big numbers also go better together with effects. Imagine a particle explosion and sound-effects every time you achieve something in the game. That would certainly look better with an accompanying 14'500, than some low number like 34. Big numbers give the ...

Sounds like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elo_rating_system might be a good starting point: it's a system which ranks players based on their win/loss record, weighted by their rank. The gap between players' Elo rankings can then be used to calculate the relative odds of each winning.

Depending on your language, I'd write my own. The typical game's rules are generally so straight-forward (make the number of people you've killed higher than the number of people they've killed, hold this item for longer than they hold it, etc) than the maintainance of a rules engine may outweigh just hardcoding the rules.

I think you will have to write your own engine. Have you ever looked at Zillions of Games? It's a commercial application that runs abstract games written in a script language called ZRF. You can get some inspiration by looking at ZRF language specification. The best documentation I've found is here. Of course, you can take a look at the implementation of ...

Smaller numbers of either is better right? So how do we make sure that larger numbers make the score smaller? We divide 1 by that number. The larger the number, the smaller the parts 1 is broken into. We can change that slightly to allow for other minimums. See the example for a perfect score being calculated when the seconds elapsed is 1 and the moves taken ...

You could possibly invert it, a lower score could be what players could try to achieve: as another example your score isn't the number of live you have, but rather the number you lost - I think Touhou works like this. Therefore your score calculation would be: score = (GameTime.TotalGameTime.TotalSeconds - startTime.TotalSeconds) * TimeScalingFactor + ...

Indeed higher scores are said to make the player feel like he's playing better, and hence could enhance user experience. This needs to be experimented for you to really find if this makes a difference in your specific game. If you compare an arcade game like Every Extend Extra Extreme and a platformer like Mario, the effect score has on the player is widely ...

Networking solutions sometimes include sophisticated matchmaking rule systems. I can't think of anything else. Games have a lot of common concepts, unfortunately not all of them can be supported very well using a plugin technology or middleware. Some game engines or game tools offer prefabricated systems for making menus and highscores, but there are no ...

I'd like to know whether there are dedicated solutions available for implementing custom rules Yes, they're called programming languages. :) Seriously though, to make truly custom logic, you typically need a system that allows arbitrary conditions and actions, which is pretty much what a programming language does. Or to look at it from the other ...

One thing you can do is scale the multiplier non-linearly, according to a logarithmic scale of some sort. Let's see every block you kill within a certain time limit raises the multiplayer by one. That leads to the escalation problem you are talking about if you allow it to go too high, and if you put an absolute cap it sets a theoretical skill cap. Instead ...

If by 5 frames you actually mean 5 render/logic frames , I'd be inclined to say that's way too fast for a human player to understand. My first reflex would be to slow down the rate at which the multiplier increases. If you want people to try to exploit your scoring bonus mechanic, you first need to make sure the player will understand perfectly how it ...

I've always rather liked bowling's score system. With bowling, if you get a spare, you get the full ten points for that frame, plus the number of pins you knock down on your next ball. If you get a strike, you get the full ten points, plus the number of pins you knock down on your next two balls. While a full bowling set is 100 pins, the ultimate top score ...