Tons of games exist here you have to solve puzzles, but what about a game that requires you to fix something, and to know the right parts you need to find in the game you need to perform a little math? One example of this would be lets say you encounter a room you need to enter, and you see the electronic controls are blown out. You take apart the control panel and see a resistor is burnt. You know a spare parts room exists but it has dozens of resistors in it. On the controller board you notice a few values. So your options are to either try every every resistor in the spare parts room until you either find the one that works or blow something else out or find Ohm's Law I=V/R formula somewhere in the game, use the values you saw on the controller board to calculate the correct resistor, install it, and enter the room. The game would not be something math related, but it may have math elements like this here and there to attempt to repair things to advance. I mean imagine a really creepy situation where you are trying to repair a control board and hear something scary moving around the corner lol. Do you guys think math calculations have no place in a fps/horror/exploration type game?
I think the reason it doesn't appear in most video games is because it is bound to make the audience for that game smaller, simply because some people really battle with math or just don't like it. For example, you've used Ohm' Law to demonstrate your idea. Obviously I get that that's just an example, but if people don't understand how electronics work at all, a formula on resistance isn't going to help them all that much. While I like the idea (and I'm sure many others will too), I just find that it may turn potential players away
Yeah that makes sense. Puzzles or just finding the correct part in the game will probably be best. Thanks!
I think having the requirement to do math calculations would be awesome! The only trick would be to implement it well. I can already imagine having boss fights or situations where you have limited time to survive, and the last thing you need to move on is to solve an equation, answer a simple math problem, etc. The key is to remember every person has a different skill level in math...make sure you decide on your audience and stick to it. I.E. a college grad who majored in math would be more challenged by calculus problems, where as middle schooler would probably just want to see arithmetic or basic algebra :/ (kind of extreme examples, but they are just to illustrate the point.) Overall, I think the idea sounds awesome! Good luck!
Thanks! This is something I have on the extreme back burner until I get other games released, but bits and pieces of it I am always thinking about. I probably wouldn't make a calculation required during a boss fight, but certainly in some type of tight space or corridor with a limited time to survive would make great sense. Like having to fix something in a tunnel with some timed kill event like a laser going through it, or having to fix the panel of a door before a thing comes passing by to kill you. There are lots of games where people love the suspense of not knowing when something is going to pop at you, but I keep thinking about the suspense on having to fix something to prevent something from popping out at you.