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Point Procurer beta - another fine product from PointCo


bjbest60

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Hey kid, welcome to PointCo and your first day on the job as a Junior Point Procurer. As you know, point procurement is a rapidly growing field and demand for points has never been higher. That’s why the company motto of PointCo is “We make it a point to make the points.” (Yeah, I don’t really get it either, but HR says I’m supposed to tell every new employee the company motto.)

 

Anyway, see that big green helicopter? We call them “choppers” in the industry. And for every chopper you crush, you get a point. So take that Joystick Controller over there and use our patented MissileBall™ technology to hover over the chopper. Press the Fire button. Boom. You just crushed a chopper and made a point.

 

Your quota for the day is 999,900 points—you’ll have to ask the foreman why it isn’t an even million. And as you might guess, that’s a lot of hovering and launching of the MissileBall™, if you get my drift. So we’ve got a pretty slick system where you can use points to buy other things that make points. See that smaller blue chopper that’s flying around? That’s an Automated Chopper Crusher®. If you buy one of those, it’ll automatically crush a chopper once every twelve seconds. Sure, that’s not much, but you can buy more than one, and soon the points will start rolling in almost like they’re free. (But they’re not free, kid. We spend a lot of points on R&D and manufacturing around here. So treat the equipment nice, okay?)

 

And those other things. Yeah, they're even fancier. There’s a Ghost Grabber®. You get a point for every ghost you grab, about once every eight seconds. There’s a Duck Dodger®. You get a point for every duck you dodge, and that’s even faster. And the fastest is the Phone Finder®. You get a point for every phone you find, too.

 

But kid, you can't just be spending your points willy-nilly. I don’t have to tell you that the competition for procuring points has never been fiercer. For every Automated Point Procuring Item® you purchase, the next one’s gonna be more expensive. To keep costs contained, every new recruit can only purchase 64 of any single thing. So spend wisely, alright?

 

Once you procure all the points, you’ll get a report about how long it took you in hours, minutes, and seconds. Just remember: when you’re done, you get to go home, sleep, and dream about procuring more points!

 

The restroom’s down the hall. You get a fifteen-minute lunch. Good luck, kid.

 

The gameplay screen.

Buying a chopper crusher.

Buying a duck dodger.

Buying a phone finder.

 

Point Procurer beta 1.bin

Edited by bjbest60
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Three other things:

 

1.) tl;dr version: It's an idle game for the 2600.

 

2.) I'm not sure the bitmap minikernel gets the love it deserves.

 

3.) If you'd prefer to silence the sound effects, you can turn off the sound by setting the color switch to BW.

 

As always, I look forward to comments / bugs / etc. Happy point procuring!

Edited by bjbest60
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  • 2 weeks later...

Interesting strategic gameplay B.J.! We'll be playing Point Procurer LIVE on the ZeroPage Homebrew Twitch stream on December 28 at 6PM PT/9PM ET. Hope you can make it to watch us play it on the show, if not it'll posted to our YouTube archive the next day.

 

Twitch Livestream Channel: https://twitch.tv/zeropagehomebrew

 

EDIT: Updated to video of episode

 

Edited by cimmerian
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Interesting strategic gameplay B.J.! We'll be playing Point Procurer LIVE on the ZeroPage Homebrew Twitch stream on December 28 at 6PM PT/9PM ET. Hope you can make it to watch us play it on the show, if not it'll posted to our YouTube archive the next day.

 

Twitch Livestream Channel: https://twitch.tv/zeropagehomebrew

 

attachicon.gif20181228-Let's Play.jpg

 

Awesome! Hope you procure some points!

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  • 2 weeks later...

We had a lot of fun trying to figure out the math for Point Procurer on ZeroPage Homebrew yesterday, thank so much for making it BJ! I also got the patch for Space Cactus Canyon and opened the letter on the show!

 

Here's the archived version of the Twitch stream for anyone who couldn't catch it live:

 

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Not optimal by far, but a start.

 

Nice! My playthroughs usually ran between 20 and 24 hours, though I usually wasn't very attentive to the game. My hope is that with actual attention the game could be completed in eight hours, like an 9-5 kind of job. I think it's possible, but alas my real job often gets in the way of my fake point-procuring job.

 

Thanks for playing!

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We had a lot of fun trying to figure out the math for Point Procurer on ZeroPage Homebrew yesterday, thank so much for making it BJ! I also got the patch for Space Cactus Canyon and opened the letter on the show!

 

Here's the archived version of the Twitch stream for anyone who couldn't catch it live:

 

 

Cool! You uncovered a lot of the tradeoffs in the game--cost vs. time. There is an optimal order of purchasing the items in order to minimize how long it takes to recoup the cost of the item. The first chopper, for example, takes two minutes (10 points * 12 seconds / point) to start turning a profit.

 

The optimal break-even order for the first twenty purchases is:

Chopper 1

Ghost 1

Chopper 2

Ghost 2

Chopper 3

Duck 1

Ghost 3

Chopper 4

Duck 2

Ghost 4

Chopper 5

Duck 3

Ghost 5

Chopper 6

Duck 4

Ghost 6

Chopper 7

Phone 1

Duck 5

Ghost 7

 

But, of course, that list doesn't take into account the future profit of the item once it's past the break-even point.

 

Each cost increase is exponential, as you discovered, though the prices are impacted by rounding. The cost of each additional chopper is 15% higher than the previous cost, for example, although that percentage doesn't settle in until about the twentieth chopper.

 

Basically, it is a large math problem, as you say. There does have to be a point where it doesn't make sense to purchase any additional items and instead just keep crushing the green chopper, but I don't have even a rough sense where that would be. The 64th chopper costs 70,232, and I'm not sure that'd ever be worth it. But it's available for the completist to purchase!

 

A side note: there is an actual end to High Score Screen Burn Slow Burn, but I roughly calculate it'd take about six months to reach.

 

Thanks for playing and diving into the mechanics!

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I think it could be done within 8h, but then you either need auto fire or a very good thumb.

 

With 10x fire/second you get 288,000 points within 8h. With a bit of strategy optimization that may bring you close to 8h.

 

BTW: I think the game should also count the number of points created manually. Then you can compare strategy vs. fast fingers.

 

Also quicker modes (e.g. 10,000, 50,000 and 250,000) seem like a good idea.

Edited by Thomas Jentzsch
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Basically, it is a large math problem, as you say. There does have to be a point where it doesn't make sense to purchase any additional items and instead just keep crushing the green chopper, but I don't have even a rough sense where that would be. The 64th chopper costs 70,232, and I'm not sure that'd ever be worth it. But it's available for the completist to purchase!

I created a spreadsheet for doing that. :)

 

My math shows that you should stop buying around 41..43. Since I did that during playing the game, I stopped ~5 too late.

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Hm... My math says:

Chopper 1

Chopper 2

Ghost 1

Chopper 3

...

(I am simply multiplying the costs with the seconds for each point)

 

Looking at this more closely, it think there are a lot of costs that are actually identical in the early part of the game--I didn't pay attention to my sorting.

 

First purchase (120 seconds recovery time):

Chopper 1

 

Second group of purchases (144 seconds):

Ghost 1

Chopper 2

 

Third group of purchases (168 seconds):

Ghost 2

Chopper 3

 

Fourth group of purchases (192 seconds):

Duck 1

Ghost 3

Chopper 4

 

The numbers start to spread out after that, though there are occasional overlaps, such as the third phone and eighth ghost being the same.

 

I like the idea of lower point goals, so I'll look into that. I also like the idea of tracking manual points, but I'm out of variables. I can turn some of the current variables into nybbles, I think, which would allow to at least offer different point total options. Thanks for the suggestions!

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