Post by Reineke in OVOCAPER comments

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Woah!! How could I take this negatively?! This is the exact kinda feedback I was hoping for! :D You explained what you appreciated about the game (thank you!!) but then also took time out of your day to document a significant flaw in the game in detail and how to potentially fix it. I really, really appreciate that.

That said, you’re right — it is a game breaking flaw. I seem to remember implementing that function (hen moving right after spawning) at some point during development so that the hen wouldn't be hidden under the other hen and players immediately understand that it just hatched. I think I implemented that function, called it a day and then forgot to check whether this actually causes problems. And after testing the game a hundred times myself, I just didn’t see the "safe" hens. Just goes to show that playtesting AND documentation are fundamental even with smaller projects...

That said, the way you described your method for the 3 hens is so impressive that it almost feels like a pro strategy rather than a flaw/bug. :D I will fix this, of course. But just out of curiosity: Do you remember what your high score was?

Again, thank you so much for this comment and writing all of this up! You made my day.

ASchumann3 years ago (1 edit) (+1)

Ovocaper Exploit

Image Caption: A score of 641950 with 3 hens in safe positions. The dog has a helmet in case another hen spawns

So I revisited my approach (I'm not avoiding work, you're avoiding work), and it's certainly difficult enough to pull off: it took maybe 15 attempts to actually get 3 safe hens. I found that the main ways that I died while getting the strategy to work were starvation (due to not eating an egg while trying to turn it into a helmet or a hen), hen explosion (if the number of hens gets over 4 or 5, good luck preventing the entire board becoming an army of angry hens), or just being pecked to death (death comes for us all).

That being said, once I did get it to go off, the game didn't exactly become boring. It's a very different sort of game, but it's still fun. The challenge shifts from "don't get pecked to death or starve" to "how long do I want to let these eggs gestate to maximize my score and avoid a dangerous hen from spawning." I even had a few close calls where a dangerous hen spawned, I had to kill it, and when I was trying to get a helmet, another dangerous hen spawned! This combined with the fact that the only way to make the score increase at a reasonable pace is to get the eggs dangerously close to hatching means that this always threatened to happen.

Anyway, thanks for making this game! I've really enjoyed playing with it and I look forwards to seeing both what you do with it as well as what you make in the future!

Reineke3 years ago

Well, that is an amazing score... haha.

Thank you for taking time out of your day (and DEFINITELY not out of your worktime or anything!) to get into this whole thing and document it. The way you described it (and I will have to try that out myself more later as well), it almost comes off as a strange gameplay-emergence-thing, so I'll do some thinking on whether I want to "fix" this or turn it into an actual feature for the next version or for a bigger "remake" of the game, if I get around to that.

In any case, thanks for all this and your encouraging words! It means a lot!

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