Game design techniques to be able to add more languages.

[davidjonas]

Hi guys,

just checking the repo after having it sit on my bookmarks for a while since I heard the podcast.
What a fun project, the game is great! harder then it seems!!

I have some suggestions:

Instead of having to exclude some languages or have an extra selection (more steps) in order to deal with screen real-estate on the bonus commands page (See discussion in #82 ). You could also randomize the categories/languages that get bonus commands, so every time you play you will get 4 different categories that give you bonus. you might be lucky they are the languages you are comfortable with :)

I also really like the idea of the persona that was discusse in the above mentioned PR but I would do it reversed. When you finish the game, instead of just the high score, you will get a "Persona Badge". example: If you get a lot of HTML and Javascript, commands you get "Web Guru". If you get plenty of bash, python, Ansible you could get "SysAdmin God" etc...
To add a few more details on this, I would optimize the competitivity aspect and implement it like this:

• Each language would be given a set of tags, these tags would be the names of the badges that it can contribute to.
• You only get a badge if you overcome a minimum amount of points (you have to have a good go!) and on that go you need to get a percentage of lets say 90% of languages with the same tag.

This would mean that some badges would actually be difficult to get because it would incentivize you to get a good score using fewer languages. It would also greatly improve replayability because if you want to get more badges you have to play in different styles and get challenging results.

Happy to continue the discussion. Hope this helps! :)