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dmazin / asteroid-tycoon

We at Asteroid Tycoon pride ourselves on our efficiency and productivity, so GET TO WORK!
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improved death messages #8

Open extrajordanary opened 10 years ago

extrajordanary commented 10 years ago

As someone commented on the LD page, it doesn't make sense for all the bots to have a died in vain message since some of them aren't meant to be collectors at all. For example the Vulture could say "$$ in recovered parts" and the Goat could say "## tiles cleared" or something along those lines.

These pop up texts often show up and disappear so fast that it's hard to read them once you have multiple bots out at once. I think to make the texts useful even when you can't see them it would be nice to maybe color code them to indicate the ROI (return on investment) from the bot. So for Bears/Ants/Vultures/Badgers, if it earned more money than it cost to make the text could be green, and if it didn't it could be red. Goats could maybe be labeled good/bad depending on how many rocks cleared vs. harvestable resources destroyed. Squirrels, maybe new tiles revealed?

I think this change would give the players better feedback about the choices they are making and would then justify tuning the game to be harder so that their choices become more important. Right now it's pretty hard to lose the game at all.

extrajordanary commented 10 years ago

Oh, also, if the emails get put into some sort of IM text box perhaps these could be put in there too, nicely color coded. Similar to a WoW-style combat log: http://media-curse.cursecdn.com/attachments/20/232/94e8d37abbe495bfd646e6f2e056702f.jpg

TikhonJelvis commented 10 years ago

I agree for the most part, although I don't think it makes sense to judge goats as "good" or "bad". I usually use goats for one of two things: either getting through some annoying rock or just making a really deep tunnel. In both cases, they're more "goal oriented" than other robots, so it's not as much a matter of ROI.

However, I could certainly see some text telling you how many resources the goat wasted. I think this is especially relevant because, right now, it doesn't really feel like that aspect of the game is really being highlighted, so people just spam goats with no regard for consequences.