The progression for my game Sous Stress has gone through many changes, of which doing so gave me both much pain but as much insight. So here’s the thought process for my iterations.
Having a progressively harder difficulty without adding new mechanics was something that I wanted to do. Considering that the timer on day1 is 2minutes long and each customer will linger for 15 seconds before leaving, having 10 customers to arrive on day 1 was decent. I don’t expect players to take too long on each customer anyways (again I am targeting people who do well with stress and enjoy games like these).
So as a math person, I made the game difficulty scale according to the number of days the player survives/ lasts during the game.
| DAYS LASTED | MODIFIER ($mod$) |
|---|---|
| Day 1 | $1$ |
| Day 2 | $1.25$ |
| Day 3 | $1.5$ |
| Day 4 - 10 | $1.5 + (0.15 * (DaysLasted - 3))$ |
| Day 10+ | $1.5 + 0.15 (10 + (DaysLasted - 10)^{1.5} )$ |
Then, according to the table above, it determines the total number of customers to spawn per day with the following formula: $10 * mod$
If you were wondering, “Hey doesn’t the Day 10+ feel quite unfair? Having it be to the power of 1.5 makes it scale up so fast!” While technically the game IS endless, I don’t exactly want people to just go on forever. Since the type of recipes and variations are limited to how many I put in the game, it’s bound to feel very repetitive eventually. Even more so since everything is based on typing, unless the player is some sort of marathon typist, I feel that it is best if this game is enjoyed in bursts. Although, I will mention that I was researching if I should do either a exponential curve or logarithmic curve to calculate this spawn rate but since I needed to set a specific number for days 1 to 3 and then 4 to 10, I decided against it.
BUT! Just having the number of customers increase isn’t right. With more customers, the day itself needs to be longer as well in order to accommodate the time needed.
This one is much easier.
Every 2 days that the player survives, the duration of a day increases by 25 seconds.
This means by the time the player gets to day 10, the duration of a day has essentially doubled since day 1. (245 seconds / 4mins 5s)
Introducing this thing called PEAK HOUR. which happens when the player has served exactly half the customers of the total number to spawn that day.
Peak Hour will spawn in a number of customers IMMEDIATELY. This is intended to bombard the player with a sudden rush of customers around halfway through the day. The number of customers spawned during peak hour is approximately 35% of the expected customers to spawn per day. HOWEVER, the customers spawned immediately during the peak hour are separate from the total number of customers spawned a day.
They simply exist to make life difficult.
These customers exist to clog up the “queue” and force the player to make use of all of the customer slots (pressing num row 1 to 0).
But of course not all is evil. these peak hour customers are slightly more tolerant and will have slightly longer patience than the normal customer. after all, when you go to a restaurant during peak hour, you tend to wait longer no?
SO! with these peak hour customers spawning in at once, this means the player only has so many seconds to serve all of them, or perhaps methodically messing up some recipes deliberately to get a few more seconds? or even just letting the timer run out? besides… the rush hour only has 20% of the customers, you could totally fail some orders right? RIGHT?