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[BarnSafari]

I would like to get feedback on ideas for the scoring system for the game I'm working on. This game is sort of a restaurant simulator (think Diner Dash) with a few tweaks here and there. One of the main differences is that customers can order between one to three items. There’s a 50% chance that a customer will order another item or will leave each time they finish eating.

Customers can leave tips, and this is affected by their happiness level. Happiness ranges from 0 – 100 and goes down depending on how quickly you tend to them. Customers also have five hearts above them to represent the underlying happiness level. One heart is filled if happiness is between 1 and 20, two hearts if happiness is between 21 – 40, etc. Each filled heart is worth 5 points.

Every item a customer orders is worth 50 points. The final score for a given customer is calculated by the number of items they ordered plus the tip. For example: a customer who ordered two items and has full happiness will have a score of 100 (2 items) + 25 (tip) = 125.

Now the tricky part is calculating the passing score for the level dynamically. I want this to auto-adjust based on the number of customers per level, so I don’t have to set it every time I make a new level. The current approach I’m taking is minScore = (fullHappinessTip + OrderItemValue) * CustomersPerLevel * percent. Full happiness tip is 25 since each heart is worth 5 points, OrderItemValue is 50, CustomersPerLevel varies, and percent is .75. Percent means that we want at least 75% of the customers served to leave with full happiness (25-point tip).

A sample minScore would be (25 + 50) * 10 * .75  = 562(rounded). This approach works well if each customer orders exactly one item. However, customers can order between 1 and 3 items so the achievable score can vary from 562 to 1312(assuming everyone ordered 3 items).

I’ve considered using the average of the possible values for number of items ordered which would be 50(1 item) + 100(2 items) + 150(3 items) / 3 = 100. This cranks the difficulty way high since the min score is 937.

I’m kind of stuck trying to figure out the best way to calculate the min score when the number of items ordered can varies. Any suggestions or ideas? Am I going about this all wrong?

[Foxwarrior]

Why not decide how many items will be ordered before calculating minimum score? By like, generating all the customers and their orders in advance, or whatever.

[BarnSafari]

That's an excellent idea, thanks so much! 

[Ordnas]

If you know beforehand how many orders you will have, why still not define the minimum score everytime you make a new level? A suggestion: when I play Overcooked, I like that the game tells me that level 1-3 needs at least 60 pts to score the minimum points and it is always 60 pts for that level. I would be very annoyed if the game changes the minimum points even if the number of clients changes, it feels too much random and not tuned or cheated.

Foxwarrior is right, I think you will need to calculate and store at level initialization the probability for each client to request a new dish, so you can put the value on the formula you posted. It is easier that way, but if you want something like "a client order a second dish dependant on if the client liked the dish \ the delivery time was fast \ other parameters", that it would be more complicated to calculate dinamically. The only proper solution would be play the new level created, and tune the minimum points.

[BarnSafari]

Yeah that makes sense. Having the same level with a different score every time would be weird and likely unfair. Thanks for the feedback!