The problem
In my game there are coins and players were running out of them quite often. “Easy! I will just add more coins”, I first thought. BUT, doing this would have cost me $8.34 more (as I would need another sheet) and this make this solution unacceptable!
The solution
At first, I got 70 coins composed by 40 of value 5, 20 of value 10 and 10 of value 20. Which sum up to 600. I had to change the composition to increase the total value, I opted for 20 coins of each which sum up to 700.
But then I had fewer coins and with the current rules of the game, I did not have enough 5 coins. Argh, I had to rethink the whole process of gaining and losing coins to make this fit. This was quite bothersome but once I had done this, the game experience was even better, less counting and trading coins. This was perfect, and my players really loved the new settings!
What I learned
In web development, we are not constraint by physics laws, the problem I had would have been solved in a snap. But the game would not have been improved as the first solution did not solve the real problem (there was a flaw in how players interact with the coins).
Now when a bug happens, I look deeper for the root cause and I don’t hesitate to rethink the whole algorithm if it is needed. I even dare to remove old feature that is not used anymore, as developers tend to stack up everything instead of cleaning. Doing this make code clearer and more maintainable.
But one can only do this, if the code they are refactoring is fully covered by tests. And that will be the subject of the next article!
By the way, if you also want to create your own games, take a look at thegamecrafter.com, they are awesome!
