Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
In its current form, that looks a little cryptic. Let's plug in some numbers. Note
that in all of our examples, the only number that we will change is the amount of
quinine that is bestowed per lever press (
A
q
).
P
qr
Number of lever presses per session
25
A
r
Amount of root beer per press
1
A
q
Amount of quinine per press
100
A
qr
Amount of liquid to be consumed
200
Placed into the formula above, we arrive at:
This means that we only need 1.8 presses of the quinine lever to give us all the
liquid we would need for our thirst. We can spend the other 23 presses splurging on
root beer. At a rate of 100 per press, quinine is incredibly cheap compared to root
beer. We could buy a lot of it, but we don't have to. With just under two presses, we
have satisfied everything we need from the less-than-pleasant quinine. When it
comes to root beer, we rats can go hog wild, so to speak.
As we reduce
A
q
dramatically (to 36, for example), we start to see a significant
difference (Figure 9.3). Now the quinine is getting more expensive. (Nothing about
the root beer has changed.) However, we now have to spend more of our presses on
acquiring quinine. When
A
q
= 36,
P
q
climbs to five. That still leaves 20 presses for
root beer. It's not really time to panic.
Continuing the trend of raising the price of quinine to the point where we are
only getting 10 per press, we find that we now need to press the quinine lever over
19 times to get what we need to survive. Despite the fact that the
relative
value of
root beer to quinine has gotten significantly better, we can actually afford
less
of it.
We are spending too many presses just getting enough liquid to survive. We can
only afford to tap into the root beer keg five times.
When
A
q
reaches 8, it is obvious that root beer is now completely out of the
picture. Our 25 presses at 8 each will just get us enough to satisfy our thirst. Root
beer is tantalizingly similar in cost to the annoying tonic water—at least compared
to what it used to be—and yet we can't bother ourselves with it.
