This was really interesting! I wasn't sold until the donkey with the coat started coming out. It made it a lot more complex as to determining what ingredients you would want to dump in. I know you didn't get a chance to finish, but if I had any suggestion, it would be massaging the item generation a bit to be able to guarantee that the player could fulfill the order *if* they're clever enough to use the power ups correctly. Obviously there's still an element of chance with the secret ingredient value, and that is something that makes it fun for the player to do some minimization around what those wild cards end up being. I thought it was a clever idea though, thanks for sharing!!
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Thank you for playing! That's a very interesting take. My gut instinct is that making sure the demand is always exactly matchable is not mathematically trivial. I'm positive the players would be able to fairly easily deduce which ingredients are needed to get a perfect score. With that being said, how would you feel about having a "least possible discontent" display? I think it would be especially fun to see how it changes after rerolling an ingredient. The player could also be able to better tell how well they did in any given round. Thank you for your comment. This is fun to think about :D
yeah, i agree it would be difficult to do the balancing definitely. i think sometimes i would get hands that were just completely hopeless -- no rerolls open, and then 4 blues that had no wildcards and no hope of adding up to the value. i think maybe what would help is just doing like a sum of what the random draw is, and then adding randomly to one card enough points to make it to within the margin of error of the cauldron request maybe? so not being exact, but at least being closer than a guaranteed 4 blue into a 15 request.
by least possible discontent, do you mean like during the addition, having the game calculate what the best possible score would have been, and then normalizing the player's score (or at least telling them what the best score would be) based on that? yeah i definitely think that would be valuable! esp in the early rounds. imo it'd be nice, if you don't want to balance the ingredient draw, then to scale the player's score based on the best possible score. i'm not sure how that would work with the rerolling though -- is it that a reroll is always randomly fixed in the "seed" at the beginning of the round?
Yes, I mean showing the player the best possible score on that round. Rerolls aren't dependent on an explicit seed (maybe they should be). The best possible score would be recalculated after rerolls or even maybe after an ingredient is dropped into the cauldron. That would give the player immediate feedback as to if their action was good or not. I wasn't thinking about normalizing the score depending on the BPS though. I set out to make a luck based game, so in my mind the BPS would be more like an indicator for the players not to spend too much time calculating that round and preserve their cognitive stamina for a round where they would actually be rewarded for it.