There is one significant issue I have found (via user testing) that occurs in my Flash version of this game that I do not recall ever occurring when I played this game on paper with my dad. This would be the possibility of players going so fast that not only do they go out of the track boundaries, but they end up in the position in which all options for their next move are off the playing grid entirely. I wonder if my discovery of this is a result of my throwing my friends into playing my game without their really having a clue what they had to do, and thus having pretty much no clue (initially) of how to strategize the management of velocity. But either way, I thought that it would be fairly bad in terms of user experience to force everyone to restart the game if a player went off the grid, so I decided to handle that case.
I consulted with my dad, and he helped me come up with a reasonable solution. I decided that if a player comes to their turn and all their options are off the grid, that move will be taken for the player as follows:
- They will move to the "middle" option (i.e. the gridpoint that would maintain both their x- and y-velocities), wherever it may be, off the grid.
- Then, they will "slide" back onto the edge of the grid. In other words, if they are off past the top or bottom edge, their y-coordinate will be adjusted, and if they are off past the left or right edge, their x-coordinate will be adjusted.
- As a "punishment" for going off the grid, their velocity will be reset to (0, 0).
Since the player has no control of this move that's bringing them back onto the grid, they are informed of it, like so:
And on your next turn, you start off at the edge with (0, 0) velocity:
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