Game Overview
Kalculator kittens is a 2D Math Game designed to help children improve their skills in answering math questions with precision and motivation from the kittens of the internet. Players are able to select from 3 difficulties which include the appearance of different operators between (+), (-) and (x).
Each difficulty tier informs the player what kind of game they're loading into so that they can make the best difficulty decision for themselves to not only improve their mental sums, but to witness the kittens flooding the bath below!
Learning Points
Math Question Generation
A proper math question generation can be straight-forward by generating 2 values and an operator to have the final value as an option, but I decided to do it a different way where it's a little more random. I went about it by randomizing the answer then deriving my values later, which proved to be slightly harder than I had initially imagined.
Development Process
Math Question Generator
Generation Method and Difficulty Concerns
The foundation of this entire project comes down to the math question generator. As mentioned earlier, I decided to do this generation in an answer-first method rather than a value-first approach.
My reasoning for this was so that I could control the final answer's variable range with each difficulty. At this stage, I was also considering on how to make the difficulty of the questions be affected by this.
Multiplication Problems
An issue I've encountered during the generator's production is that with this answer-first approach, there can be cases of prime numbers since it's a random value between 2 and any number ranging from 100 to 200.
As most people might be aware, Prime numbers are essentially numbers that are larger than 1, but non-divisible by anything other than 1 and itself. That means that deriving the answer for multiplication would not be possible unless it turns out to be 1 x (__).
In the case that the number generated turns out to be a prime number, I've set the system to check if the number can be divided by any numbers between 2 and the square root of the number rounded up + 1. This way, it'll check the divisible numbers and set them aside. If there are numbers that it's divisible from, randomize between those numbers and that's essentially the multiplication question generation pool
Scoring
The right and wrong answers are bound to an overall score. A right answer would provide 25 points and increase the timer slightly, while a wrong one would deduct 10 points and decrease the timer a little more than slightly.
Overtime, with every 20 seconds IRL that passes if the player is that good, the rate of which the timer counts down would increase ever so slightly. This makes the difficulty curve slightly increasing with each round and ensures that the game eventually will come to an end.
Generating Cats
The Central Video
The way I handled the video that plays in the center was to have the videos in H.264 format in the streaming assets folder and referenced in the form of a URL in the video player. This way, it's WebGL compatible as well in a simple showcase.
The Cat Balls and Object Pooling
When answering the questions, a bunch of cat balls will spawn with the video cat's picture on it. The number of balls that spawn increase with the amount of score you earn per question answered
When the answer is wrong, the balls will de-spawn and empty out the tub also based on the amount of score lost. With this in mind, I initially had the cats in a single box, but came to realize that the physics in colliding that many game objects with a continuous detection would cause the game to lag severely.
Instead, I opened the lid and let the kitten ball overflow. Outside the screen, I had set up a recycler trigger area to catch any balls that fall out and recycle them back into the object pooler. This way, there wouldn't be stray balls out of view that consume any CPU and all would be recycled to be visible on screen.