Some issues about the current game settings, Some topics to discuss

This is a topic about some issues I found during playing this mod. Of course they are all my personal thoughts and some of them might not fit your taste. My goal is to present those whom I think they can be improved and discuss with everyone.

First of all, is about the score. I think level bonus is pretty unfair, the formula is WorldNumber * CurrentLevel * 100. Taking E10M10 for example, that would be 10000, the same as a total sphere collected bonus in an entire world. In short, the portion of scores from level bonuses will be greater and greater as game proceeds.

Another is actually not an issue, but I can't see a very encouraging point for getting the score as high as possible. Maybe the player can exchange something by scores (aka money?). For example, it is impossible to collect all bonus spheres if the player had no money to buy extra time in blitz mode. It will influence all spheres bonus and a chance to the hidden level. And even more, maybe the scores in world 5 can be mutiplied by a factor, or some special equipments to be obtained in world 5 only, indicating the player will miss a lot if he didn't go to hidden levels.

Hmm, yes, I see your point about the Level Bonuses. I still would like to reward the player with an increasing amount of points as he progresses through the game. And I do like the idea of rewarding the player lots of points for beating the hidden levels. Maybe something like:

World 1: 100 * CurrentLevel --- E1M20 = 2000 points
World 2: 125 * CurrentLevel --- E2M20 = 2500 points
World 3: 150 * CurrentLevel --- E3M20 = 3000 points
World 4: 200 * CurrentLevel --- E4M20 = 4000 points
Secret World: 750 * CurrentLevel --- E5M4 (the last secret level) = 3000 points

...could work?

And about the user worlds, well... they're technically worlds 5-8, rather than 7-10. Maybe just a variation of the above:

World 5: 150 * CurrentLevel --- E5M20 = 3000 points
World 6: 175 * CurrentLevel --- E6M20 = 3500 points
World 7: 200 * CurrentLevel --- E7M20 = 4000 points
World 8: 250 * CurrentLevel --- E8M20 = 5000 points

...would be fine. These could simply be defined in an array that would look something like this:

Then S_LEVELEND would pull from this array instead of using WorldNumber * CurrentLevel * 100. Seems a simple enough solution to me.

As for the score issue, I see your points (hurrrr) - however, with Chip's Challenge, the main reason a total score existed was to get your overall score (from levels 1-144) as high as humanly possible, in order to, er, simply become the player which had attained the highest score total. There is a lot of competition in this area still: Chipsters still try to beat the game as fast and efficiently as possible to try to beat each other (although they are finding fewer and fewer ways to rack up points, so the only way you can beat the previous champion is to literally do it by a second or two ).

But that's beside my point. What I planned to do was present the player with his total score right at the end of the game, so that we could hold a highscore table either here on the forums or on ZDoom. Just a little bit of fun, really. As for scores acting as money - hmm, I don't know about this. Would buying extra time in Blitz Mode be necessary (since our levels' timelimits have all been set carefully so that the level is possible on Blitz Mode)? It's a good concept, but we need to come up with a few more purposes for it. What could you buy with x points?

Ok, I got your idea. I'll add your way into the library. About "shopping", I don't have concrete ideas, they flashed in my mind and I think it's worth a mention, nothing big deal. If we do want to do something like that in the future, we can discuss at that time.

It's offtopic, but this happened because I found E5M4 has a lots of bonus points. When I warp to E5M4, I dropped from the chair because of the thunderous "AAAAAAAAAHHHH". Looks like the limitation of 256 spheres in a level has reached. I guess you want to make some spheres being 20 points per pick, but now we have a score number system, that'll be a bit overwhelming. Do you want to do some changes to it? (For example, I can add a function that modifies the multiplication factor of points per sphere.) If so, if the maximum sphere limitation has to be expanded, please tell me, that's nothing but a few bytes to modify.

There is a WORLD_FINAL (MAP99), are you going to make this world?

Yes, there'll be a final world. I've got a couple of ideas floating 'round my head for that map, but nothing solid yet. It may have to have special handling in some cases (it's probably only going to be one level, so there'll be no need to show an end-of-world screen, for instance), but yeah, we'll cross that bridge when we come to it.

I'm a bit stumped as to what happens on E5M4 (yes, turn your volume right the hell down before you do check it out again ), because for some reason the sphere count exceeds 256, even though there aren't that many spheres on the grid. Are the spheres spawned twice in the same spots? I can assure you that's not meant to happen. I know it uses some really lazy for() loops to spawn the spheres in a big square, but they shouldn't be called twice - anything you can do to fix that?

Fixed.

Another issue in E5M4 is the final line "You are a true Master of the Blocks!" seems not in a good position (and the color is the same as the level end texts). Maybe you can make it look better.
(In order to see the results fast, you can comment out the loop that spawns spheres to make instant exit instead of life-consuming collection. )

Heh, that was a poor attempt by me to get the "Master of the Blocks" text to replace "Yowser!" on the score table. Would probably be better if it was made into a string variable in the library. The default string would be "Yowser!" (but could be redefined in S_MAPEXTRAS), and would reset to default at the start of each level. This would also allow me to have it read "Success!" at the end of each world.

Oh, sure, that's actually a neat way to do this.

Added.