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Are there any games that have more than 134,217,728 levels? Yes, I'm being serious.


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In case you didn't know, when you attach Sonic 1 to Sonic & Knuckles, it gives you access to 134,217,728 blue sphere bonus stages. Yes, seriously, 134,217,728 stages. No, I have not played all of them and I am not planning on doing so at this time. Are there any games that have more levels than this?

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Is that 134 million levels you must complete to finish the game, or 134 million possible combinations of a far lower number of levels? In the later case, youxia is correct in that any game that randomly generates a map for each level you traverse will in principle have an infinite number of levels, though generated by algorithms and only a few (like shopping cities) manually created.

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55 minutes ago, carlsson said:

Is that 134 million levels you must complete to finish the game, or 134 million possible combinations of a far lower number of levels? In the later case, youxia is correct in that any game that randomly generates a map for each level you traverse will in principle have an infinite number of levels, though generated by algorithms and only a few (like shopping cities) manually created.

So basically it's a set of 128,016,000 predetermined levels. No random stuff or procedural generation or anything like that like a rougelike. I think. Something like that. I'm not 100% sure exactly how it works. Once you finish the 128,016,000th level, the levels loop starting from the first one again. Once you finish the 134,217,728th level, the level number then resets itself as well.

Edited by Steven Pendleton
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7 minutes ago, youxia said:

There's no way some dev sat down and hand-coded 130 million individual levels without procgen. You can use a constant seed number so it looks like it was predetermined.

Oops, yeah, that's what I meant. I just tested it on my Nomad and it does give me the exact same levels every time. You can do some skipping if you get a perfect, but if not, it's the same thing every time.

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I always thought it was clever growing up, and wished more developers did things like that. I find a lot of console rpgs are relatively limited and doesn't plan for post-game enjoyment, they always have an end and even if you can get back into dungeons, there is no post game scaling to allow challenge with good equipment. 

 

I've been meaning to put seeding procedures into some of my older pc games but rarely get the chance to give it ago, but I like the idea that people can play the same levels in a seemingly random way. Randomisers for popular retro games sometimes come with an easy graphical code so people "racing" a game have the same setup. 

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13 minutes ago, Steven Pendleton said:

Looking at my original post again, I wrote it extremely poorly; what I should have written is:

 

Are there any other games where you progress through a specific set of more than 134,217,728 levels in a linear, non-random manner before it loops?

I'm going to come out and say its unlikely, though the idea sounds interesting. I think its fair to claim that various pre-mega drive consoles had games with seeded levels (platformers/maze style games) but chances are there is not that degree of numbered levels. Part of it is complexity, in a fetch and carry maze like game, there might be 3 or 4 moving elements and then a grid of squares, probably less than 100 with various walls, platforms etc. With the Sonic bonus levels, the grid is significantly larger than the playable space that was in single screen games of previous consoles, and a bit more processing power to work on generating and displaying said levels. Its a neat programming trick that allowed anyone who thought "well what if I put this game in it" to be rewarded with an actual response - and not intended as a primary feature of Sonic and Knuckles (of which the primary reason was to allow sonic 3 to be playable as it was originally intended, and its secondary reason was to allow the amusing element of playing Sonic 2 with Knuckles instead).

 

There is of course games like the original Elite that made very clever use of reading its own game data to generate new systems with set names etc, which was impressive back in the day of cassette tape games - and then there is things like elder Scrolls II that had a silly size of playable map due to generation - however when it comes to level / puzzle based games, I don't think there is anything as famous as the Sonic one.

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I suppose if numbers weren't an issue, a game like River Raid could have had 134 million procedurally generated levels that always would appear in the same order. The problem is to work with random seeds in the millions range on the 6502 though. I mean a 24-bit number is only 16 million and even that would be quite some overkill. Also you probably need a very good algorithm for every possible generated level to be playable with a meaningful challenge.

 

On the other hand, perhaps you don't need that many seeds. Previously the lagged Fibonacci PRNG found in the C64 version of Defender of the Crown was discussed and intvnut deducted that one had a period of nearly 63 million. Sure some numbers will appear multiple times but if your level generator takes a handful consecutive numbers each time, you probably can create a lot of levels with small amounts of random seed generation.

Edited by carlsson
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12 hours ago, Cobra Kai said:

How many maps does Worms have?

I've been relatively curious as to how exactly Worms generates the landmasses since I was like 5 years old. I know it's procedurally generated, but I mean like I want to see exactly how it works. I'll have to look into that, but it has a lot of levels.

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"There are currently over 9725 levels in Candy Crush Saga's HTML version and over 9800 levels in the Windows 10/App Version. These levels stretch across 649 episodes, with some players having access to even more as play testers. With new levels being released every week, there seems to be no end in sight for the popular puzzle game."


https://www.msn.com/en-us/entertainment/gaming/how-many-levels-are-there-in-candy-crush-saga/ar-AALYvfy
 

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