Wednesday, June 23, 2010

It puts the treasure in the dungeon

Rewards require several things before they are actually rewarding. They are required to increase something, somewhere - be it your score and sense of self value, your stats, or simply a counter saying 'treasure collected'. They also need to have some sort of challenge to attain them. This challenge can range from the simple 'wait ten seconds to claim treasure' or 'overcome this specific challenge'. The quality of the reward is usually matched to the difficulty of the challenge. Make it too rewarding and the reward feels cheapened, make it too challenging and the reward feels lacking.

Overcome a challenge, get a matching reward. It's a simple formula, and in a game you're planning out ahead of time it's a simple matter of putting the challenge in between the player's starting location and the treasure.

In a procedural game, it's a lot more complex than that. You don't know where the treasure is going to be located, and you don't know what the map is going to be. You can't assume anything.

Currently, there are three types of treasures, ground, monster, and trap. ground is pure reward, and monster and trap are both challenges. Logically, I'd be most likely to create a good challenge to reward ratio. But it's not just as simple as choosing a floor, piling treasure on it and moving on. I have to keep track of when the floors don't connect all the way, or when there are multiple branches. The monsters won't be in the way, if they're in the shallow dungeon to the left, and the treasure is in the deep dungeon to the right.

I have no current plan for how to deal with this, but I'll let you all know when I do.

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