Posted January 31, 2025 by Lou Bagel
#High Scores
There is another build version uploaded, and I will give the details on that, but I did want to post to call out some high score movement!
The names "DAVE" and "BAGEL" that were in there initially were from me. I did that to test everything was working but to also have the tables not be blank. I have deleted those now that we have high scorers on each difficulty!
Now all the scores on the list are from actual players!
Congrats to DubniumGames for holding onto the high score!
As you can see, Jin tried hard to crack it, but no success yet! Dub is holding on, at least until Retro decides to show up . . .
A bit more on Difficulty 1 later...
Congrats to Jin on the new high score on difficulty 2!
The first to break a minute!
Congrats to ASPIRIN on being the first to beat difficulty 3!
But congrats again to JIN for grabbing the current high score!
APPLE, I won't leave you out - congrats as well on beating difficulty 3! As you can see, only three people have done it!
DubniumGames and I were joking if a sub-40 coffee run is possible on difficulty 1.
So, I just had to test it out!
I did break below 40 seconds, so a new high score is possible!
Of course, as the developer, I know how everything works and is programmed exactly, so I'm not saying it is obvious or expected. I just wanted to let people know it is possible. Also, its not like I always know the best strategy - a lot of times you design something with the "right approach" in mind and then people come up with approaches you didn't think of.
I deleted my sub-40 high score and I'm not going to say the exact time it was, so as not to set a benchmark for like "the best possible time" as of course, for example with walking time and waiting for the coffee to brew, there has to be a floor somewhere.
I did record it to possibly share later, but wouldn't want to spoil anything for people!
The updates in this build actually had to do with the high scores table as well.
When I first setup the loop to create the high scores text, I was just too lazy to count the number of lines. So there was a line hanging halfway off the screen before (and more off the screen). So I simply capped that at 18, which fills up the page.
I know that was super lazy, but it is one of those problems that you worry about when you get to it. Like the, what happens if TOO MANY players play my game? lol. Like that is a good problem to have - there was a chance no one plays my game and the high scores table never fills up, so why worry at first.
Also note, the 18 was a target number. I made the notepad to look good and made it fill the screen, and that is how many lines it ended up with.
Trying to not go into all the dev details and keep it focused on player-facing, so there was more issues of player's high scores not showing up so I added another workaround to fix that.
For those that want to dive into the details, I misunderstood a part of my noSQL query, where I expected "filterExpression" to filter by difficulty and THEN "limit" the number of results. But it turned out, it was limiting the number of results AND THEN filtering it by difficulty. So once difficulty 1 started filling up with the fastest times the top times on difficulty 1 and 2 weren't included due to the limit.
So for now, I set the limit to 300 - so will work until we get more than 300 hundred high scores lol - and long term I have to decide if I want to make a composite key or add the difficulty to the game column (instead of having its own column). Or switch to SQL lol.