set accurate possible max number of points

[pahp]

Figure out what the max score is, and fix the number.

[spacehobo]

This is easier to do once we know how many total points there will be, and assign ranks to all the scores. It's probably worth putting in a low-priority category and leaving until much later.

[spacehobo]

Object scores

# one_night_in_sf on  main [$?] via C v13.2.0-gcc via  v18.13.0 
:; grep -c '^has.*scored' untitledHeistGame.inf 
18

However, we made the two heavy scored objects mutually exclusive for this, so that's more like 17. And we made the task list scored (which is either a bug, or we originally intended the player to pick it up somewhere). It starts in their inventory, and it would be absurd to make them drop it and get it again; so I'm going to ignore it for now: 16*4 is 64.

But the two crawl spaces (ceiling and underfloor) are rooms, so those are each 5 points instead of 4 for two extra points, making the total 66.

Task Scores

Array task_scores -> 20 20 20 20 20 20;

Basically we have six tasks right now, each worth 20 points for a total of 120. So the top score at present is:

188

Decisions

Of course all of this is arbitrary. We can change the value for object and room scores whatever we like. One point? Two? Objects greater than rooms? Whatever we want!

We can also change individual task scoring, so we might decide that grabbing Elly's computer (which seems to be the exit condition) is 50 points instead of 20, or that the Titor plans are only worth 5 or something. In general, scoring should be a value judgement of how essential we feel a given experience is to the game.

[pahp]

Thanks for this breakdown, @spacehobo -- personally, my gut sense is that the items on the task list should all be worth the same amount, and that it be significantly higher than any other score. I think 20 is an OK number, but if we wanted to make it larger, we could (e.g., 50). That way, the score message is essentially a "hey, you checked something off the list" message. But if you folks think there's a good reason to have the "trophy" items have different values, that's OK, too.

I like the use of scoring to say "hey, you're on the right track" or "this thing / space is important", but I don't have strong feelings about whether rooms or objects should have different values, and while I think we should know what the top score is, I don't care that it is a particular number (e.g., a nice, round 200 or something).

So, I'm pretty much fine with whatever you come up with.

[spacehobo]

Per my comments in #88, I'm strongly leaning toward a quick audit to normalise points to be either a hint or a goal. Hint points can be tiny, maybe even just one point per hint whether it's a room or an object: I think that once we split the two categories cleanly, we'll find that all of the "hint" points add up to less than any one goal.

So then we can just have a grand total score that just indicates completion of all tasks (which is just num_tasks * 20, and work out what an absolute completionist would get and give a sort of easter egg "Bored Nerd" kind of title when ranking scores at the end.

[pahp]

I love this approach and I love the score titles.

On Wed, Jan 24, 2024 at 11:29 AM Abolish ICE @.***> wrote:

Per my comments in #88 https://github.com/UMDLARS/one_night_in_sf/issues/88, I'm strongly leaning toward a quick audit to normalise points to be either a hint or a goal. Hint points can be tiny, maybe even just one point per hint whether it's a room or an object: I think that once we split the two categories cleanly, we'll find that all of the "hint" points add up to less than any one goal.

So then we can just have a grand total score that just indicates completion of all tasks (which is just num_tasks * 20, and work out what an absolute completionist would get and give a sort of easter egg "Bored Nerd" kind of title when ranking scores at the end.

— Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub https://github.com/UMDLARS/one_night_in_sf/issues/128#issuecomment-1908603523, or unsubscribe https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/ADUPIKL4OLV4ETEM7QON2S3YQFAJHAVCNFSM6AAAAAA3DBEHDCVHI2DSMVQWIX3LMV43OSLTON2WKQ3PNVWWK3TUHMYTSMBYGYYDGNJSGM . You are receiving this because you authored the thread.Message ID: @.***>

-- Peter A. H. Peterson, Ph.D. (he/him) Associate Professor Department of Computer Science University of Minnesota Duluth (land acknowledgment https://about.d.umn.edu/campus-history/land)

[spacehobo]

OK, I'll explore in a branch then, and see what I come up with.