a note on scoring

tartley on 2009/09/01 11:52 of Broken Spell

Our gameplay leans heavily on 'Joust', except instead of one-hit kills, the losing party loses a feather. Both player and enemies can collect the shed feathers. The idea is number of feathers gives you more ability (eg. stronger flap). If uncollected, feathers fall off the bottom of the screen.

We had been scoring 10 points per collected feather. A friend wandered by and pointed out that if we made the scoring dependent on the number of consecutively collected feathers (without hitting any enemies) then it gives the player incentive to rush around attacking as many enemies as possible BEFORE then rushing to collect all the resulting feathers before they fall off the bottom of the screen.

The code change is tiny, and the movement of all the entities is unchanged, yet the difference on gameplay is incredible. A palpable urgency is injected, a modicum of tactics, geometric scoring rewards for playing well, and a risk-reward dynamic, since waiting before collecting feathers risks losing them off the bottom of the screen.

Coolio!