Interestingly, while I was struggling to reach 100k in test1, my first play of test3 I scored 1.9 million. I think this was a result of the punishment being so much stronger in test3 - strong enough that I didn’t want to incur it, and so minimised my spinning, whereas in test1 I generally kept spinning until I lost the kitten (scoring 0 on most kittens).

Only problem I see (this is pure speculation) is that there is no real punishment for dropping a kitten. So what you’d do is spin a kitten until your happy with the score and then throw it into the oven. If you fucked up, then you just start again. But this is pure theory talk. I should try it out and see how it works.

However, I do think that the scoring system could be rejigged. Reading Jason’s post, about the not losing kitties if you put them in the oven, gave me an idea for a better scoring system. What about:

If you manage to spin the kitty and then put it in the oven, you get all the points, but dropping it means you don’t get any points from the spinning. So the Punisher scoring system. BUT:
If you do drop a kitty into the fires of hell and not the oven, you don’t get the points BUT you also don’t lose that kitty. So you decrease the number of kitties by putting them in the oven.

Would that work?

Never the less, scoring system has very huge effect on how fun the game is. Or at least it has a huge effect, if you compare it to how little a crappy non existing story affects on how fun the game is.

I really liked your FPS mod. I think could work pretty well.

Well, some score systems are abstracted (like Tony Hawks) and others are closer to natural instantiations (number of pikmins in your pikmin army). It seems to me that scores are linked to core gameplay with different “tightness”. So, some games naturally express what’s “good” better than others, which have more of an “umpire” sitting back, interpreting the skill of natural play in a deterministic way. Yeah. I don’t disagree, but I think it’s a little less sharply cut than that.

But scoring systems, I love. I love chains and multipliers and rewarding people based on the skill demonstrated in an indiscrete action (like, rewarding a sniper shot based on range, relative velocity, aim’s rotational velocity [for snap shots] etc, rather than just a fixed point value). Love ‘em. I think I love them because when they’re done well, they really recognize a player’s ability, and encourage them to plunge into the depths of the possibilities. It makes a player feel like their expression is being noticed - it’s a kind of narcissism.

Crap, I really have to do a FPS mod one of these days, which has a tony hawks style appraisal of combat skills.

On the other hand I should really test it with an exponential per kitten scoring system. That could work because it would add a nice risk to the game. To get a good score you’d have to risk it all and spin and bang the kittens around.

The score mechanisms of cacodemon have really turned into an obsession for me. Thanks for feeding my obsession with new ideas

You only lose kittens if you drop them. If you put one in the oven, the amount of kitties left stays the same.

I’d enjoy this because it would extend the potential length of a game ^^

That’s an interesting point that you brought up. I actually don’t know how to fix it. The divide points by the hits made, could work, but the problem is that you really don’t know how many times the player has hit a wall until the kitten is killed. And to reduce or divide the points the player has made at that point is a bit anti climatic.

But then again I think that a careful player might be allowed to have his points if he has the patience to work that long hours.