Behind the Scenes: The Risk Game Mode (Patreon)

Hey everyone! 😊

About two weeks ago, I started writing this post explaining how the risk game mode in Morexis Minigames 2021 works, since I thought it would make an interesting topic to revive the "behind the scenes" post category. While I was writing that post, putting together excel sheets and coming up with metaphors, I suddenly realized that there's a much simpler and better way to create the risk game mode than the one I used. 🤔

So instead of writing the post, I immediately spent a couple hours putting together that new system and updating Morexis Minigames. And now I want to use this post to tell you about both the old and the new method. I think it's a great example of overthinking a problem and an interesting showcase of how a solution can be achieved with different methods. We'll be talking about some technical stuff but I'll try to make it as vivid as possible! 

▶️ Be sure to check out my excel sheets visualizing the two solutions which will be explained in this post! 📊

The problem

The systems behind the Basic, Luck and NNN game modes are quite simple. When you begin the Basic game mode, a timer starts and once that timer runs out, you get to cum. The NNN game mode does the same thing except for the cumming part. The Luck game mode creates not one but two timers: One that determines the time until you are allowed to cum and then a very short one which determines how many seconds you actually have to cum. So basically, all three game modes do the same thing apart from the ending (which is a pretty important part to be honest 😅).

The Risk game mode on the other hand is much more complex. I wanted the game to determine whether and when you get to cum. That on its own wouldn't have been difficult. However, a crucial aspect of the game mode is rewarding the player for taking more time to play the game. I wanted the player to have a higher chance of cumming if they "offer" 60 minutes than with only 15 minutes.

The first solution

My first idea was to use a mathematical function to determine the cum chance based on the time value the player enters. However, I could neither figure out a fitting function nor a way to use it in Eos (the engine in which I create my games, for the new people). So I tried to come up with an alternative solution.

At the start of the game, the player sets a maximum time. Let's use 40 minutes as an example. In this first solution, the game then sets a time zone, the "cum chance period". With a time value of 40, this time zone spans from minute 10 to minute 70. As the name implies, the game let's the player cum at any point within the cum chance period. 

Now comes the most important part: The overlapping time of the player's offered maximum time and the cum chance period determines the player's chance of cumming. In our example, if the game decides to let the player cum at minute 55, they are denied because the game ends after 40 minutes. On the other hand, if the game decides to let the player cum at minute 15, the player is allowed to cum (and the game will end after 15 minutes instead of 40). In this case, the overlap is 30 minutes long (player's time 40 minus the minimum time 10). Since the cum chance period is 60 minutes long, the player's chance of cumming is 50% (= 30 / 60). 😄

However, since the cum chance is determined by the overlap and the cum chance period's time and both of those are relative to the player's time input, the chance isn't affected by the player's offered time. To achieve that, I differentiated between five time levels granting you different chances of cumming. Within time levels, offered time doesn't affect the chance of cumming. You can see the exact time levels and a visualization of them in the excel sheet I linked at the start of the post. 

This first solution was unintuitive, unnecessarily complicated and only insufficiently did what I wanted it to do. But it worked, so I didn't want to spend more time racking my brain about a better solution - until I started writing this post some time ago and a light-bulb lit up above my head. 💡

The new solution

Instead of the awkward time zones and limited time levels of the old solution, the updated Risk game mode determines the player's chance of cumming with a mathematical function relative to the time the player offers. The function for this is "f(x) = 130-1.0125^(395-x)" and if you're wondering how I got those weird numbers, I just played around with a graph plotter until I had a curve that did what I wanted it to do. Luckily my time calculating functions like that in high school wasn't that long ago, so I still had some idea of what I was doing. 😅

The big advantage of this method over the previous one is the fluid increase of the cum chance. After two hours offered time, the player has a 100% chance of being allowed to cum but judging from the amount of images and dialogue lines, the game isn't really intended to be played this long. Before the 100% are reached, there are 115 "levels" of cum chance based on the time input - in contrast to the mere five time levels in the old method.
(115 because there is one level for each minute, of which there are 120 in two hours, but the offered time has to be longer than 5 minutes.)

However, that function only determines whether the player is allowed to cum, not when. To randomize the timing of being allowed to cum, there's an additional bit of code which multiplies the player's offered time by a random number lower than 1 if the game decides to allow the player to cum. Here, levels play a role again: If the offered time is shorter than 20 minutes, the minimum game duration is 50% of the time input. Otherwise, the minimum is 25% of the offered time. So if you offer the game 18 minutes and are allowed to cum, the game can be between 9 minutes to 17.82 minutes long. If you offer 24 minutes on the other hand, the game can take anywhere from 6 minutes to 23.76 minutes. You can find the code to determine this in the excel sheet as well.

However, the as I mentioned in the beginning, I tried to use a mathematical function right at the start. I was mostly stuck when it came to implementing that function into the game itself, since you can't just give the game engine a percentage and say "Please only execute that action at this probability." So my light-bulb moment was much less about everything I explained so far and much more about how I can get that into the game. 😄

Once again, I'll only outline the general way it works and spare you the exact details, simply because I think they're neither interesting nor relevant. And to be honest, the way this works is incredibly simple. First, the aforementioned mathematical function calculates the corresponding cum chance for the player's offered time as a number. For example, if you offer 20 minutes, f(20) would solve to 24.53, which rounded to zero decimal places is 25. Next, the game generates a random number from 0 to 100. This number is then compared to the result of the mathematical function: If the function's result is larger than the random number, the player is allowed to cum. In this case, all the random numbers up to 25 are winning numbers, which means a 25% chance. To make it a bit more visual, this is basically the same thing as drawing a random ball out of a bag of balls numbered from 0 to 100 and winning if the number on the ball you get is a 25 or lower. 

Aaaand that's the whole idea behind the new method for determining the cum chance in the Risk game mode. Of course, there's some more stuff going besides the things I've outlined in this post but I think going into detail about every little thing is enjoyable for neither of us. In fact, I doubt most people have read the text this far. So as a reward for being so interested and commited, I'll now reward you with a hint for a cool hidden easter egg in Morexis Minigames 2021. You can find the hint in the last line of the of the Character Expanison post. Good luck finding the secret easter egg! 😉

I hope I could give you some insight into the creation process behind my games. And this whole thing was just one aspect of one game mode in one game. So yeah, creating a whole game is quite complex and takes a lot of time and work.
I also hope this post was understandable and not too dull. Outside of my games, I usually don't work with math stuff and particularly not in English, so please let me know if anything is wrong or unclear. I know from Discord that some of you are really skilled regarding math and coding, so feel free to point out anything that could be improved.

In general, I want to thank you for how well Morexis Minigames 2021 was received. As I said multiple times in the past, Morexis Minigames was intended as a small side project but turned into so much more. The fact that you not only support me throughout a creative process like that but also genuinely enjoy its result fills me with happiness. 🥰

To give some of that happiness back to you, I decided to revive last year's JOI advent calendar on our Discord server. It features all new videos and is a bit different from last year's advent calendar in general but I definitely suggest checking it out if you're looking for some sexy content and activities to count down the days until Christmas. 🎁🎄

Alright, I think 1700 words is more than enough for one post. I'll let you go enjoy the first weekend of December now. I don't think I'll have a Christmas present for you this year but I'm planning to post some more information about the Home Office Game soon.

Enjoy the Christmas season and thank you very much for being so awesome~ 😘❤️