Food placement algorithm

[mwcz]

I had an idea that I think would be really fun, if we could get it right. Right now food is placed randomly and that works really well. But I have noticed that it's hard to get a food "streak", ie, capture several in a row. It's hard to get into a groove!

I'm imaging that it would be super fun if there were veins of food, that you could capture all in a row. But of course it would be valuable, and other players would be drawn to it too......

Not the best picture but something like this:

It still has a lot of randomness but might be more fun and satisfying to capture food arranged in that kind of pattern.

[Jared-Sprague]

Hey I think this could look cool! One thing to think about is how this will look when 30+ people are playing and some might be really big. how will it look when lots of it is in a respawning state? I think the only way to answer that is to test it. I think this would be a good visual enhancement for phase 2.

[Jared-Sprague]

The other thing I was going to say is when we change major design portions of the game, that we do so by adding new implmentations that we can switch out, not by overwriting the existing ones so its easy to swtich between them e.g. different food placement algothrithims. So in the zorbio.js we could have an initFoodRandom() and an initFoodTree() then we just change which function the server calls.

Same thing for the food color generation.

[mwcz]

Oh yeah, absolutely, I was imagining we could have multiple food population algorithms that could be switched out. I should have some that with coloring.

[mwcz]

Note to self: @inconvergent has a bunch of great generative algorithms that could be adapted for this purpose. https://github.com/inconvergent?tab=repositories

[mwcz]

[Jared-Sprague]

Love it! and thanks for the gif! I'll include it in the blog post.