Play Tracking

Over the weekend, I worked on how I would track the player's capabilities and handle level generation. The way it works out, I would need to generate either ~150 complex-logic levels or ~400 simple-logic levels if I don't use some form of auto-generation. (This isn't really as bad as it sounds: a level is rarely more than a page long, excluding plot.)

Now, the story will still need to be constructed - my memetic engine can't handle that (in this game, we'll see about the next one). But constructing the levels is something it can handle, knowing the memetics of the situation and the kind of challenge a player can handle.

Doing this, I'll still have to create the individual components - the multitudes of enemies, tiles, backgrounds... but I won't have to put them together. The game should be able to weave them into the story points. If it turns out to fail, I can fall back on the complex-logic levels.

Here is the RTF file I created summarizing it for myself. More careful calculations show this basic idea has the right order of magnitude, but can be rather badly off. That's what you get for approximation.

The basic idea is that the more elements you have adding to the complexity of the enemies, the more difficult it is to navigate the pattern they create. It will probably be refined, but it is probably accurate enough for my purposes as it is.