once people start playing, make the analytics better. we have a few basics, (player count, session length, button clicks), but still missing a lot. at a minimum, to know how fast people are progressing:
graph expansion-count over playtime
graph meat over playtime
extra credit:
graph playtime when the player buys their first (queen, nest, hive, ...) (maybe easier with achievements)
graph offline vs. online-active vs online-idle time, ratios
graph playtimes when people quit and never return
do this sooner rather than later, we need this info to balance the game
You should fix the area selection bug that happens when you click things too quickly (you know, where a big area of the page becomes selected). Simple CSS fix for that.
experimenting, it is a bit annoying that the cursor is a text-selector when you're hovering over a unit in the list. it should behave like a proper link. I think that'll fix text-selection for clicking too fast too, need to experiment though.
buy a percentage of the max you can afford. maybe replace buy-n, which gets really tedious at large numbers; buy-percentage could work with a nice friendly slider
haha. I don't think this can be used to cheat the way #45 can, but we can detect this more easily.
should probably do something about the negative values and undefineds. actually, let's leave the negatives, makes exploiting harder, #45 should block overflow exploits. fix the undefineds though of course.
probably stick to manually-built units. autobuilt units can still work, but probably feel less satisfying, and it's harder for the code to check for them too
achievement points are nifty and easy, do them
resetting achievements is dumb, preserve them across resets
for example, util.coffee and spreadsheetutil.coffee
create packages that we can use in other games with nothing more than 'bower import x'. minimize writing new code, just extract and package what's already written for this game.
create another tree of units, with another currency, for advanced players? we have plenty for first-timers/first reset, more would be confusing but advanced players can handle it.
maxing out javascript's numbers isn't impossible here,especially if people manage to produce larvae faster than I planned (reset bonuses later?). use bignums. we're already using mathjs, which has them.
This must be done before 1.0 because it might impact save states, and we can't reset people after that.
units multiply specific other units' power. encourages mixed militaries without encouraging build-some-of-everything.
make twin upgrades larvae-heavy and closer to linear cost, to encourage focusing on a few specific units instead of upgrading/building everything (is this really a problem, though?)
give units unique abilities. ex. triplet swarmlings
conquest. manually invade opponents (ex. humans, "ancient aliens with lasers") for rewards
auto-produce military units, OR give territory gains bonuses. make the player choose one or the other.
casualties of war. negative-compound-interest? (might not be fun)
pick which ones we want to do and create new issues for them before closing this issue.
reward active play with clickable bonuses every so often. these should be worthwhile, but not mandatory. for comparison, cookie clicker without the get-lucky upgrade seems about right, maybe a bit too low; cookie clicker with fcfs/eldeer/lucky-frenzys makes activity mandatory for progression.
we already reward activity pretty heavily with non-increasing costs/exponential growth. This might be unnecessary.
shouldn't introduce these early on. maybe not until after first reset - meh, it could be earlier than that. first nest?
create a page with all available upgrades listed and purchasable. easy to lose track of what's available when you have to select each unit. this is just an alternate view, upgrades still available with unittype selected.
would be much easier with #22 done, so we can reuse the upgrade template in the new page.
sidebar works great with smaller numbers of units, but it's a little ridiculous when you get to the later tiers, and our plans to add more units will only make it worse.
no-unit-selected screen is completely empty. so much wasted space.
show only the top 2-3 tiers for each group?
the "no unit selected" page has a table with all the units in columns, derivative-clicker style?
table similar to above, along the top (or bottom) of the screen?
I like 1e+100-style formatting for very large numbers because I don't intuitively know what a duotriginvigindecillion is, but for smaller numbers it's pretty ugly.
people are getting to higher-tier military units faster than higher-tier econ units. is that okay? do we add more military units, or increase the cost of what's there, or something else?
kill an enemy swarm to allow reset. in reset 2+, kill previous reset's swarm?
military strength based on territory/sec
something interesting to do with military!
anytime after this kill, press the reset button to reset
reset lore: evolution/mutation/natural selection. form a new brood from your swarm's most elite children, ensuring their offspring too will be elite
reset rewards
flat production bonuses are boring, though they do scale infinitely. try to avoid them.
at least make the player choose between production bonuses for single resources. no all-resource bonus
larvae bonuses are especially interesting. easily implemented as free expansions; changes gameplay by enabling more/longer exponential growth
reset rewards should change how you play the game. first playthrough can have a single optimal path, but resets should begin introducing different playstyles and interesting choices
talents: mutually-exclusive reset bonuses
for example, choice of military unit. swarmling triplets XOR swarmling compounding XOR giant arachs produce arachs/sec XOR expansions improve devourer output XOR ...
reset credit: based on number of expansions
or, one credit per reset? long resets feel punishing; have to make sure games are long enough.
maybe two reset currencies? one encourages long resets, one encourages short resets
make sure the optimal way to play for long-reset credits is to, you know, have long resets. easy to get the math wrong and make short resets optimal like so many other games
costs with large numbers are hard to read. colorize the costs, or add an option to display them as a percentage of what you can afford instead of a flat number, to make it clear which resources you have plenty of and which resources you're bottlenecked on. (I haven't seen this in other games yet, but it sounds nifty.)
that way players can at least see when something changes, even if I forget to increment the version number.
alternately, make "grunt deploy" require a version bump. how will it know what version is deployed already, though? maybe write /dist/version.txt on build, and deploy fetches http://.../version.txt?
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