Hello! More questions from a beginner
Do you know if there is a way to test the stats as you go on the backend? As in, is there a way to get a sense of how high it is realistic for a stat to be while writing. I want to set the values for a test, but don’t know what values a weak vs medium vs strong build might have at that stage in the story…
Thanks!
As far as I am aware, there is no dedicated function of ChoiceScript to produce what you’re describing. Personally, I have an upper limit for what a realistic value would be for a given statistic in mind and then increase it by five or ten (whatever would be best for your project, depending on how many stat increases you give) per chapter. So, for example, in the first chapter, I might check if the player has a kindness stat of 10, and then in the second, 15 or 20, and so on. If you don’t want to keep track of things in your head, you could make a spreadsheet, I suppose?
Or perhaps just make a simple check to see if a stat is greater than what you consider to be a weak/medium/strong value and have it show a yes or no, throw it in the stats screen for easy viewing, and delete it when/if you submit your game?
i have used this modified randomtest a LOT for my current project and it is a huge help. helps me see the highest/lowest possible values for all the variables i want to check, and helps me see if certain variables skew higher/lower scores than others.
This is outstanding! (I assume). I don’t suppose you could walk me through how to actually get/use this thing? I’m clearly not experienced with this…
Thanks!!
One of the benefits of fairmath is that it’s easier to do this. You know the values will always be between 1 and 99, and that a very consistent player will get to around 70-75 and slow down from there (if you’re using %+10 or %+5 as your usual increment). If you want to set some outcomes that only a totally consistent player can reach, you could run RTs or play through yourself to see what the top score ends up being. But you can also just set thresholds for high, medium, and low consistency on the fairmath stats.
Its more figuring out where to set stat checks in the early/middle chapters that I’m struggling with. Well, the early chapters. Haven’t gotten to the middle ones yet. I may be making this seem harder than it is so far simply because my dependent statistics weren’t updating correctly and it totally threw off my sense that I was correctly estimating anything….
It’s super helpful knowing those values will naturally cap out around 70-75 for a consistent player. That takes a lot of the guesswork out of where to set those “high” thresholds.
For the totally consistent, elite outcomes, running a few RTs or just a couple of manual playthroughs focused on maxing that stat is probably the fastest way to confirm the absolute peak you need to code for.
If you found that helpful, I posted a couple of related tips around the same time over here: Still struggling with else/elseif and goto commands - #14 by Havenstone