Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
We encounter a massive foe that will take 260 points of damage to kill.
Additionally, we determine that this foe is so powerful that it is likely it will kill us
within about 60 seconds. Therefore, at five seconds per action, we only have 12 total
actions that we can perform before our time is up. With all that in mind, we decide
that this certainly qualifies as an “urgent situation� and pull out our trusty blizzard
wand.
Before we proceed any further with this pending altercation, let's lay out the
numbers that we have established so far:
Our fireball spell:
5 points of damage
Our blizzard wand:
60 points of damage
Maximum total actions:
12 (i.e., 60 seconds at 5 seconds each)
Damage we must deal:
260 points
We can, of course, drop these into the same formula that our mathematical
rodents used to determine their choice of beverage:
where:
Casts of blizzard
C
b
Cbf
Total casts of blizzard and fireball allowed
D
b
Damage from blizzard
D
f
Damage from fireball
D
bf
Damage necessary to defeat the enemy
This would yield the following:
Remembering that we want to limit the number of uses of our blizzard wand,
our optimum course of action would be to use the wand four times, dealing 240
points of damage, and then cast four fireball spells to deal the remaining 20 points.
