Our first scimatics project of the year, Game of Exponent Laws, was the third project in scimatics so far featuring game design. I’m starting to sense a pattern here, but I’m not complaining – this is fun!
On our first day we had to quickly make a dice game in small groups, I wasn’t entirely satisfied with the result and took it home. I ended up creating this scratch game.
I ended up doing my project solo, so of course it had to be space-combat related, or I mean it could have been swords, whatever.
The goal of the project was to explore the question: How does math make games more complex, interesting, and re-playable? In general, mathematical elements can allow players to combine abilities, power ups etc in different ways to create a superior strategy leading to victory. Using exponents in a game makes it more complicated, exponentially so. (And no I’m not joking the more exponents you add the more complicated it is to balance new ones.)
Part of the challenge was to use 4 exponent laws in our game, I really only had three but I added in the cheeky rule x^0 is 1, it makes little difference to the score but there it is.
Here’s a picture of the game in progress, picture taken over the “Table nebula” as the game doesn’t really have a board.
I have made the rules public, if you can understand them.