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Space: the final frontier?
Enthash
Bscotch Posts: 2 Babbyscotch
in Flop Rocket
Made it! 500+ heroes later...ah well, as that one guy who finally made it to space said: "Great gains cannot come without great sacrifices!" In other news, the grieving widows of the dead cavenauts have sued the government for gross negligence and stupidity. Their spokesperson released a statement earlier today: "I mean, come on! Building your launch pad in a cave? Who does that?"
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Will. Will does that.
SETH COSTER
Butterscotch Shenanigans
Games Programmer
"MAAAAAAAN! WE MADE IT! WE REALLY MADE IT!"
"SPAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAACE! I'm in SPAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAACE!"
"Mom? Guess from where I call!"
"I finally see the infinite darkness of space, lit by a BIG BUNCH OF STARS. I'm in SPAAAAAAAAAACE!"
"Oh right I completely forgot that mom died in the 349th rocket crash. Dang. I'm sad"
"Can you believe it?"
"Hardly. By the way, be prepared."
"Whut?"
"We are facing a freakin' huge lot of ROIDS!"
"Oh well. I don't care I'm in SPAAAAAAAACE!"
About the end... I was so happy to get from 2,5km to 5km that I found the end seriously cool. I had a freakin' adrenaline rush. And I made it after 123 unsuccessful runs. Don't know if it's good or not.
I also spend my time editing my own posts because it's a nice community here.
SETH COSTER
Butterscotch Shenanigans
Games Programmer
That pretty sum up how I felt. I was pretty ecstatic at the end and I had a kinda ridiculous adrenaline rush. By the way I didn't feel like I did "only" 120 runs. I'd have said 200+
And I'm honestly surprised I managed to get a "good score" with my setup (seriously my phone has weird behaviors sometimes).
@BscotchSeth How many runs did it take for you?
I also spend my time editing my own posts because it's a nice community here.
SETH COSTER
Butterscotch Shenanigans
Games Programmer
I also spend my time editing my own posts because it's a nice community here.
They haven't put a number of death stat though.
I also spend my time editing my own posts because it's a nice community here.
Edit: Oh thanks.
In my attempts to climb the leaderboard I have noticed that the perks are pretty unique to each game. I can almost envision the debate involved when deciding on perks and tracked stats.
<Feedback>
If I may opine... It appears that the tracked stats on each game are tied to the victory conditions. Flop Rocket has an end, so counting how many times you reach that end is an accomplishment. Roid Rage has no end so high score and total score make sense. For this Bscotch gamer though I would like to see a little of each in all the games. If not for perks then at least for leaderboards.
Flop Rocket counting dead ducks but not dead pilots doesn't make a lot of sense. Of course the person who flies through the whole maze will kill the most mobs. That is a goal beyond any player control. Roid Rage should keep count of total time survived as well, because sometimes you can fly around like a master jedi but the juice just isn't spawning.
I know you guys don't have time to do everything, I'm just suggesting that you consider another stat or two for us to chase that may not be so closely tied to optimal gameplay.
You built the physics and the rules of the game, after that every stat you track and all the perks you invent are what bring about the promised land, Emergent Gameplay. Give us reasons to compete and we will open your game more often. Take a poll. Maybe I'm wrong but every time I see someone else's name above mine on a list I try again... and again..... and..... Maybe that's just the old school gamer in me.
Well, you get the idea and I've rambled on enough 3 am thoughts for a month.
</Feedback>
I also spend my time editing my own posts because it's a nice community here.
We're already tracking a BUNCH of stats in FR, so it's dead-simple to add them to the leaderboards. I agree that we should have player deaths in there, and it'll be added in the next patch.
Just so you know why we limited things: we have no idea what we're doing on this web stuff (I joined the team in August and had to teach myself PHP/MySQL etc before I could build this system). Scalability of BscotchID is a huge point of concern for us and keeping a leaderboard updated requires sending and retrieving data from our server with some regularity. We limited the scope of BscotchID, and also the number of leaderboard stats, while we collect data and figure out how costly this system is to us.
Right now we don't have enough data to answer the cost/scalability question once and for all, but we will a few weeks after we launch Quadropus + BscotchID since that is by far our most-played game. If we learn that the system is robust and scales well, we'll befree to expand BscotchID functionality a little more and add in more leaderboards.
@Ulnarevern I wanted the BscotchID system to be completely game-independent, so that nothing would have to be specifically changed for any given game. When I built the stats page functionality, the extra information associated with each stat that would determine which direction the stat should go (i.e. is highest or lowest better?) was not accessible by the leaderboards. And so I took the generic approach that would work for the majority of stats, which is that bigger is better. Which prevents us from putting in best-time leaderboards (though, as per @akkmed, we could do longest-time boards).
And just for a little more context, dealing with smallest-is-best scores is a huge pain in the ass, especially when we want to store your best score on the server. The initial value for more-is-best scores can be set to 0 and then you don't have to worry about anything, since 0 is the worst possible score and anything else is better. Therefore you can just tell the server, "keep the max of the old and new values" and you'll always have the best score. But what do you do with mins? You need to do the same sort of thing, only always keep the min of the old and new values. But what value you do you start with? Numeric types in programming have an upper bound, so you could set it there (but those bounds are stat-dependent and hard to deal with in the general case). Or, for timed things, you can say "0 is an impossible score, so I'll set that as the starting value and always choose the min unless one value is zero." But, for some minimizing scores 0 really does mean 0, so this doesn't work well in the general case either.
To be clear, the minimum score problem is solvable by adding complexity and special cases to the code, but a major constraint that we're working with is to start BscotchID with the smallest amount of storage and processing requirements possible while we find out if we can pull it off. So we're sticking with the simplicity of always-max scores for now.
I hope that clarifies!
I also spend my time editing my own posts because it's a nice community here.
Maybe we need an infinity mode for people with completely insane skills.
Also, I would definitely watch a screencast to see how you play this game.
SETH COSTER
Butterscotch Shenanigans
Games Programmer
By the way I made a friend try the game and it seemed way faster than on my phone, so I guess I'm always playing in slow-mo, but particularly with the worms around.
I also spend my time editing my own posts because it's a nice community here.