from Hacker News

A Bestiary of Functions for Systems Designers

by polm23 on 8/3/21, 6:03 AM with 15 comments

  • by jayd16 on 8/4/21, 4:38 PM

    Mathematical functions for Game Systems Designers. Not what I expected from the title.
  • by jameshart on 8/4/21, 5:34 PM

    While it is definitely useful to have some of this background, and sometimes to get particular mathematical or physical simulation properties for a system you actually do need to pick these things carefully, in practice, to make gameplay configurable and tweakable it's often better to eschew the purity of mathematical functions and just use a configurable model instead. Unity for example has an object called an 'AnimationCurve' which can be used to make relationships between properties in a game highly configurable. Want to flatten the damage curve for a particular weapon to balance it out against a certain kind of armor? Don't struggle to adjust parameters for your logistic sigmoid to get it to behave, just add a point to the curve in the editor and drag it.
  • by neolog on 8/4/21, 11:26 PM

    What does "systems" mean here? Does it mean "game"?