Scoring
When we left off last time, I had implemented drag and drop, and cluster detection. That's a good start, but to make this a game the player needs some feedback. And the easiest way to do that, is to give the player points. This will give the player some guidance as to what the game expects from them, and gives them a goal to work towards. Like a good boy.
But that immediately begs the question: how do you score a cluster of items? I went back to my original inspiration The Art of Clean Up, and it is very obvious that items are usually clustered by color, size or shape.
Additionally I could identify a second level of organisation, as within a cluster there could also be sub clusters or "bands". For example in image towels, inflatables, and parasols are clustered together, but you can clearly see that they're also lined up by color. Then there's the image of a deconstructed pine twig, and you can see it is clustered by twig or bristle, but within you can see it ordered by size. So clusters are defined by a quality, like shape, and can have another quality for banding, like color or size.
Items clustered by type, and banded by color or size
That gives us something to work with, but also presents us with two problems to solve:
- Clusters don't start out neatly, but as the player is still organising things, it will have intermediary states as well. This means the scoring system needs to be able to score "messy" clusters, as well as "clean" clusters.
- A player can put an item anywhere within a cluster, so how would you be able to detect bands?
I've thought about both problems for a while, and I have some initial solutions for them, but for now I am only going to score by qualities present in a cluster, and leave banding until after a round of playtesting.
For now, items have a set of qualities, like color and shape. Per category, a cluster can count the amount of values that are present within itself. If there's multiple values for one category, any item within that category are only worth a single point. But if there's only one value for a category the items are scored on a Fibonachi scale.
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