Trash Idle - Development
So I'd decided that the simplest way to bring the Cauchy distribution into a game was as a currency in an idle game. Here are some of the games I had in mind as I started on Trash Idle:
- Cookie Clicker
- AdVenture Capitalist
- (the) Gnorp Apologue - My personal favourite
- A browser game where you grow larvae into many different classes of insect. Sadly I cannot remember the name of this game.
(the) Gnorp Apologue
How Trash Idle Works
For my idle game, I knew from the protagonist artwork that the simple interaction would be typing. I honestly think it's fun to just mash away at the keyboard sometimes.
I then started exploring lots of ideas for a full-blown idle game. However, the jam's deadline intervened, and I had to strip back to the simple working core of what I had made. It's not exactly what I wanted to make, but actually the simple result is a good demonstration of the Cauchy distribution in action.
Trash Idle
The game works like this:
- The large bar under the protagonist automatically fills over time, and the player can type to make it fill faster. The amount that the bar fills is a uniform roll in the range [0, 0.8].
- When the large bar is full, it resets to zero and a small amount of progress is added to the bar over the PC. The fill amount here is also a uniform roll.
- When the bar over the PC is full, the player has created some trash! The reward is then some money. A uniform roll is made to decide which currency the player will get, and each currency is equally likely.
- Once the currency has been decided, we make a final random roll to decide how much of that currency the player will get.
Each currency uses a different function:
The amount in 元 元 元 is drawn from the standard Cauchy distribution. The currency here is an alternative symbol for Chinese yuan. I chose it just because of how it looks.
The amount in £ £ £ is a uniform number in the range [0, 1].
The amount in $ $ $ is decided by something called a Lorentzian function. I copied the equation from the Cauchy distribution Wikipedia page at the last minute, knowing very little about it. After observing the game, I really wish I'd have used a Normal distribution instead. We will understand why later.