(Which is interesting, have I reached a point in recovery where this is less effort again?)
Okay, game structure. I discussed the basic idea of 868-BACK's server map in a previous post (on Patreon), to summarise:
- In 868-HACK after you hack a server, there's another random one after it, with difficulty increasing until you lose.
- For 868-BACK I've introduced a choice, selecting servers on a grid.
- Why would you ever choose a harder server? Because their data is more valuable (because there's a score multiplier).
- Servers also house devices, letting you gain additional powers as you progress in the game. (Unlike HACK where the only progression is increasing difficulty.)
Now, the idea of a score multiplier is sound, but still: why would you choose a harder server? As far as I've described, the optimal play for a high score might still be to always pick the easiest server, to minimise your chance of losing and get more points in the long run. HACK had this lovely tension between survival and score - your score is "points per round" times "number of rounds" so you can do better by increasing either of those values, and the ideal maximum is some incalculable midpoint between safety and foolhardiness. But making that work well relied on the danger increasing fast enough that you can't take "number of rounds" to infinity. If in BACK I'm putting this danger curve in the player's control, where does the pressure come from?
So: I've limited the number of rounds! This loses that beautiful multiplication by the number of rounds - but I've decided to be very comfortable with losing specific elements: the sequel is a new game finding its own way, and the original isn't going away. With a limited number of rounds, you get a high score by maximising your per-round score, so there's an incentive to attempt difficult servers.
We also don't want the optimal strategy to always be "pick the server with the highest mult". I'm not too worried about that because it's a multiplier: you still need to get the points to multiply. Probably there will be a sweet spot in the middle, and probably finding it will be tricky and depend on all the details. (And the details are interesting! I'm discussing this here at a very abstract level by just looking at difficulty as number of powerups, but it's really about getting to know the specific powerups and thinking about the complex ways they can interact.)
Next point: what should the multipliers be? My first thought was multiplier = number of powerups. (Yes the difficulty modifiers are still called "bonus powerups", deal.) But I probably still want some servers with no powerups because the game is complex enough to get started with anyway, so to not give zero for those my second thought was multiplier = number of powerups + 1. Generally start with the simplest idea: if it works out then it'll also be easier on players, and if it doesn't well you haven't spent too much time going in the wrong direction.
Obviously these numbers are "wrong": e.g. a server with one powerup isn't twice as hard as one with none, it's maybe 1.25x, so giving it a 2x multiplier isn't accurately giving a reward commensurate with the difficulty. But it doesn't have to be! I don't really mind if the gradient here is quite steep giving players strong encouragement to play with powerups: that's where the game gets really interesting, and it's more important for a scoring system to encourage doing interesting things than to measure of how well you played.
As I mentioned above, the scoring isn't the only reward for hacking a server: we're also collecting devices. Intuitively, the more powerful devices would be accessed through the more well-defended servers. But wait: if we keep the dead simple rule of "+1 powerup = +1 mult", those servers are already offering the best reward! Should I put the best devices on easier servers so there will be a choice of better scoring vs. better abilities? Or should I make the rule more complicated, e.g. "+1 powerup = +1 mult OR +1 device tier"? In the end what we've found playing it is that each additional powerup tends to increase the danger level superlinearly, as you increase the risk of nasty interactions between the different powerups. So a mere linear increase in multiplier doesn't cut it by itself, and it works out perfectly to give something like "+1 powerup = +1 mult AND +1 device tier".
(Okay, this is really long, I had two more main points to make but I'm tired and it's gotten long. So my conclusion is: writing is still more tiring for me than video, but this was too big a topic to get through in one go no matter what the medium and that is probably why I wasn't getting around to doing the video.)
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