Problem
The roach round grew a lot in one arc — maze (#43), a brood of 2-3 (#44), crumbs (#45), tunnels (#46), poison and a gecko (#47). Every piece is covered by tests, but tests only prove the logic holds; they cannot say whether the round is fun or how long it takes. Nobody has actually played it yet.
Two specific things worth a real session at the keyboard:
Round length. hits needed to clear a round is now the brood's whole health: roughly 7 on easy, 15 on normal, 21 on hard. Hard was 6-8 hits for a single roach before this arc, so a hard evasive round is now about three times longer, and there are two of them in a plan. That may be a good climax or it may drag. Per-roach health, roach count, or the number of evasive rounds in the plan are all knobs.
Readability of the new field. The maze, the silver hide-holes, the dark tunnel mouths, gold and purple crumbs, corpses, and a cyan gecko now share one screen. Colour and shape choices were made against the GitHub-contribution-graph palette without seeing them together in motion. Worth confirming a player can tell at a glance what everything is, and that the gecko does not read as something you are supposed to swat.
Wanted
Play several rounds at each difficulty, then tune the constants at the top of Garden (MAX_BAIT, BAIT_EVERY, BAIT_RANGE, FEED_SECS, TUNNEL_PAIRS, TUNNEL_SECS, TUNNEL_ODDS, POISON_ODDS, SICK_SPEED, SICK_SECS, GECKO_AFTER, GECKO_SPEED) and the difficulty table to taste.
Notes
Deliberately deferred from the ecology arc — balance is a judgement call that needs a human at the controls, not something to guess at from the code.
Problem
The roach round grew a lot in one arc — maze (#43), a brood of 2-3 (#44), crumbs (#45), tunnels (#46), poison and a gecko (#47). Every piece is covered by tests, but tests only prove the logic holds; they cannot say whether the round is fun or how long it takes. Nobody has actually played it yet.
Two specific things worth a real session at the keyboard:
Round length.
hitsneeded to clear a round is now the brood's whole health: roughly 7 on easy, 15 on normal, 21 on hard. Hard was 6-8 hits for a single roach before this arc, so a hard evasive round is now about three times longer, and there are two of them in a plan. That may be a good climax or it may drag. Per-roach health, roach count, or the number of evasive rounds in the plan are all knobs.Readability of the new field. The maze, the silver hide-holes, the dark tunnel mouths, gold and purple crumbs, corpses, and a cyan gecko now share one screen. Colour and shape choices were made against the GitHub-contribution-graph palette without seeing them together in motion. Worth confirming a player can tell at a glance what everything is, and that the gecko does not read as something you are supposed to swat.
Wanted
Play several rounds at each difficulty, then tune the constants at the top of
Garden(MAX_BAIT,BAIT_EVERY,BAIT_RANGE,FEED_SECS,TUNNEL_PAIRS,TUNNEL_SECS,TUNNEL_ODDS,POISON_ODDS,SICK_SPEED,SICK_SECS,GECKO_AFTER,GECKO_SPEED) and the difficulty table to taste.Notes
Deliberately deferred from the ecology arc — balance is a judgement call that needs a human at the controls, not something to guess at from the code.