Sunday, September 06, 2020

[ohooqvfv] Worst button-mashing game ever

Phase 1: Mash a button a million times to earn the right to face the final boss.  At 8 button presses per second, this will take 35 hours.  Probably best is to allow any button to count as a button press to decrease the stress on any one button or finger.  In order to discourage pressing multiple buttons simultaneously or rapidly alternating between different buttons, the first press of a button different from the previous press does not count: repeated presses of the same button is the object of (this part of) the game.

Then, the final boss is purely RNG.  What should the probability of winning be?  Perhaps 1/4: choose wisely for a single button press among A B X Y.

Inspired by the difficulty of speedrunning when there is a task late in the game that is heavily dependent on the random number generator.  In particular, this was inspired by the reverse engineering of the RNG for Sploosh Kaboom in Zelda Wind Waker (Linkus7, et al.).  Our button-mashing game seeks to create the worst possible speedrun experience.

Slightly more sophisticated Phase 1: each button mash has 25% probability of earning 1 point, sort of similar to the final boss.  You need to accumulate 250,000 points to complete Phase 1.

Evil: The Phase 1 RNG could be deterministic, the same every time.  But no unassisted human will be able to memorize the very very long sequence that lets you complete Phase 1 faster.  Let the Phase 1 RNG also depend on user inputs, so a single "mistake" causes the subsequent play to become totally different.  The sponge construction (e.g., Keccak) might be good for this kind of RNG.

The final boss should remain totally unpredictable.

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