I got a lot done today. This morning I fixed a bug in my rendering code. I had used some Apple sample code to get my OpenGL view set up and they were using a “replace” texture function instead of a “modulate” texture function. The end result being that textures that had alpha channels wouldn’t fade. That took me a couple of hours of reading my OpenGL book and digging through code to figure out. I haven’t done rendering code this low-level for a number of years, but it’s starting to come back to me. It’s fun.

After I fixed the texture bug I implemented a new score algorithm. Until now the game was scored something like this:

match score = current level * ((number of tiles in the match * tile modifier) + (number of special items matched * special item modifier))

What I did today was put in a score multiplier that increases with every successive combo you make, so the scoring now works like this:

match score = multiplier *  current level * ((number of tiles in the match * tile modifier) + (number of special items matched * special item modifier))

This meant, though, that I needed to re-tune the modifier values to bring the scores back down to reasonable levels.

I’m finding the score tuning to be quite tricky though. I want it to give large enough scores that it feels fun (what’s a “fun” number? 1,000,000?), but that results in enough of a standard deviation that experienced players have noticeably better scores than new players. I don’t think I’m quite there yet. I also think I lowered the modifiers too much today. A good score in my game used to be over 1,000,000 points, but now on really good games I’m scoring around 500,000. Maybe I just need to double or triple the modifier.

Finally, this afternoon I added a new animation for the game when your multiplier increases. Yesterday I added some new animations that show your current match’s score. However, now I’m starting to get concerned about how much is going on on the screen at once. When I dropped the multiplier animation in this afternoon things were getting pretty busy. I think I need to move that animation off the board somewhere and make it less obtrusive.

Seeing the game with all these animations in it is pretty exciting, though. It’s making the experience of playing it that much more fun, because there’s extra visual reward for doing cool things. Hooray for cool things!

Owen

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 25th, 2008 at 2:00 pm and is filed under Design, iPhone, Technical. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.