Maidens of the Kaleidoscope

~Hakurei Shrine~ => Help Me, Eirin! => Topic started by: zemoo on November 16, 2014, 09:34:08 AM

Title: Touhou Bingo
Post by: zemoo on November 16, 2014, 09:34:08 AM

Touhou Bingo will work like you would expect a bingo game to work: all players will have the same randomly generated bingo card with all of the squares being Touhou achievements and the first person to complete 1 full row or column wins. Everyone would start at the same time, seeing the card when the challenge starts and stream their game play. I wanted a way for people with differing skill levels to compete with each other in a fun and dynamic way. It works with speed run games and even though it seems like it shouldn't work, it is both accessible and skill intensive, which is ideal. It could be a weekly challenge or something of a pick up game.

here is an arbitrary sample card

Fuijyama Volcano Cap	PCB 1cc Hard	Kokkuri-sans Contract cap	use Marisa to complete at least one other square	TD 1cc Hard
SA 1cc Extra	Divine Virtue of the wind God cap	complete another square without using bombs	Double Black death Butterfly(stb)	EoSD 1cc Hard
UFO 1cc Hard	complete another square using Reimu	PCB 1cc Normal	Philosophy of a Hated person Cap	Most Valuable Vajra Cap
Complete a run with less than 200 graze	And Then There were None cap	SA 1cc Normal	IN Lunatic ICC	Possessed By Phoenix Cap
"the books" cap Lunatic	PCB 1cc Phantasm	Genetic of Subconscious Cap	DDC 1cc Normal	complete one other square without focusing

This card is likely not balanced, in that one row or column is probably much easier than the others, and I would hope to eventually have the cards balanced, and possibly be able to calibrate them for skill level (make them harder or easier). We could assign a point total to each potential square and aim to have each row and column sum to be within a range of point values. Then it's just up to each player to determine their fastest/most consistent row, given the card and complete it. I believe OoT bingo cards are designed to take between an hour-and-a-half and 2 hours to complete by top players. This was what I was aiming for, but may not be ideal for this type of game, where a reset/ mistake could cost up to 30 minutes. I separated the squares into three types of achievements: full game runs, individual spell/game section caps, and modifiers. Full run squares say to beat a particular game or extra stage on a particular difficulty. individual spells/ sections ask the player to capture a certain spell card. Modifiers provide an additional challenge that they can apply to either of the full game runs, which ever they choose. I made sure in my card to have 2 full game runs, 2 caps, and 1 modifier in each row and column. There could be more types of achievements, or less strict rules of how they should be arranged.

There are some logistical issues: games with spell practice are easy to grind the one card you are trying to cap, while capturing the timeout card near the end of an extra could lead to a large time loss if you mess up. Should potential time affect the rating given to each square? Should Marisa B be banned in MOF? Having all stages on all difficulties unlocked for practice would give some players an advantage. Perhaps time is not the best way to determine a winner.
I wanted to gauge interest for and request help making this. Would anyone like to try this? More ideas for squares are welcome. We could start with every difficulty on every game as potential full run squares, and every spell card as potential capture squares, but it may be silly to have "capture icicle fall easy" and "UFO lunatic 1cc" on the same card. Is there anything else I missed?

Title: Re: Touhou Bingo
Post by: Shimatora on November 16, 2014, 10:36:39 AM

This is a really nice idea! Perhaps you should have different tiers of bingo cards to encourage different skill level participation?

Title: Re: Touhou Bingo
Post by: Drake on November 16, 2014, 11:40:04 AM

I was about to ask if you got this from Saturday OoT Bingo and then read a few sentences. Could be cool. One thing to note is that the entrants stream their runs to confirm, so you'd need something similar, or at least checking timestamped replays.

You can get around some issues of huge potential length from the randomization by using latin squares, or at least a relaxed variation, yes. But different tiers of cards (probably two) is almost necessary, I think.
Having stages unlocked for practice is not an issue, considering many of the goals are clears of the games to begin with. Spell practicing should be avoided, though. The captures you listed, besides Books, shouldn't be difficult after a certain skill threshold, so Fujiyama for example would take barely a minute. At the same time, more difficult cards would definitely need to be balanced against potential time loss (i.e. capturing a relatively easier card in a longer stage, versus capturing a difficult card in a shorter stage).

Title: Re: Touhou Bingo
Post by: TresserT on November 17, 2014, 04:45:14 AM

Sounds very interesting, I'd do it/ will do it if/once I learn how to stream gameplay ^_^

...I want to give a suggestion, or help fix some logistics error, or at least say something besides "I'm interested" but I can't think of anything to say :/

Oh, I thought of something. Drake's (and that other guy's) boss rush patches. Don't know if they would significantly change or help the timing of anything, but they're just something to consider. Also, maybe you could just ban spell practice and say "you have to reach the spellcard in regular gameplay". Unless that was assumed in which case I feel dumb.

Title: Re: Touhou Bingo
Post by: zemoo on November 20, 2014, 08:07:46 AM

       I should elaborate on the bingo card making process, and how it is balanced. The bank of potential squares are each game on each difficulty, each individual spell card, and some challenges imposed on your gameplay. The naive way to make a card is just randomly throw 25 of them onto a bingo square and challenge people to do them. The way they do it for Oot and other successful bingos, is to weigh each square in a square bank and use dynamic programming, or graph theory, to make sure the rows and columns are similarly weighed. So if the hardest square is something like UFO lunatic 1cc, any row with that square will have to have something like "Icicle fall easy capture" to offset it, or it just will not be present on a card unless it has a high weight. In my sample card, something like "use Marisa" is interesting because it is sometimes very inconvenient to use Marisa (IN Magic team is the worst, and SA Reimu A is the only noob-friendly shot-type) so in row 1 of my card using Marisa in PCB or TD shouldn't be inconvenient, but for column 4 with IN this is more troublesome (I don't know how Marisa fares in DDC because I haven't played it yet) and the program should be able to keep track of different weights for this row and column. To make a card all the user would need to do is pick an rng seed and a weight range for the rows/columns. The program then generates a card while checking to see if it is balanced and adjusting if it needs to. We may need to borrow some code from the other bingos and modify it, but in the end the runners shouldn't need to know any computer science to make a card.
       Squares can be ranked for both time and difficulty if need be, and the rows can be balanced for both as well. Time is easy, just time how long it takes to do the stage up until the card or 1cc, but difficulty is somewhat more arbitrary. It would have to be a community effort to rank the difficulty of each run. For the sake of argument lets say EoSD Normal 1cc is 10pts difficult. Then where do we place PCB Normal 1cc? I wold say 9pts. I think PCB is slightly easier. What about SA Normal 1cc? 15pts?I am biased though. It would be too ambitious to assume I would get it right on the first try, so there will be some unbalance at first, but hopefully it will evolve into something well balanced. Different tiers can be accomplished by setting the range for each row, e.g. if the rows in my sample card are worth ~100 pts each, then you could make a card that has the rows be wort ~50 pts each, which means likely lowering the difficulty level of each square in the row. But note, that even though the sample card has hard and lunatic 1cc's on it, there are rows that can be completed without ever playing on hard, you just have more options if you can do more, which is what I was going for. It may be easier (and certainly quicker) to forget about full game runs and just do captures of particular spells with maybe two modifiers.

       It definitely seems like a good idea to ban spell practice, otherwise It'd be faster to cap Fujiyama Volcano than any of Rumia's cards, even if you cannot consistently do it, just because you are forced to go through the stage. Rather than ranking each card in games with spell practice really low to compensate, we should just force all of them to be done in practice. This might preclude the photo games, which I wanted to include, but such is life. Also banning patches might be a good idea, the hitbox patch for EoSD makes it easier and rather than force everyone to use it we should force everyone to play it the way it was meant to be played (I may be biased since I don't use the patch). Also with something as innocuous as VPatch you can force your game to run at 61fps, which shouldn't change the difficulty all that much, but over the course of a 2 hour bingo could save you a couple of minutes, which is huge in an autoscroller. I like the idea of making people stream it, both for the spectacle, and to keeps people from cheating: manually changing a rpy file's timestamp or pause buffering to trivialize a really hard card, which would go unnoticed if we used replays.

I've gotten some interest from the twitch Touhou community I don't know what quorum we would need to do a bingo, but scheduling aside it might be enough for a test bingo. It was brought to my attention that this will be easier to explain/ discuss over a skype call, so I may organize a stream/skype discussion session sometime after thanksgiving.

Title: Re: Touhou Bingo
Post by: zemoo on January 02, 2015, 02:16:17 AM

Bumping

I haven't forgotten about this, just been busy with work for longer than I thought

I'd like to do this  the skype conference on Tuesday Jan 6th @ 8pm (-5 GMT) I might also stream it if I can find a dry-erase board or some other way to keep notes

Here's a tentative agenda:

Rules: patches/versions/modes of play
Time: schedule pilot run and maybe setup a weekly schedule (Sun 11th?)
-figure out an ideal game length
First Card: figure out how to make the first card
-use my mock card/random card
Balancing: explain community ranking system
Review/Q&A: some time at the end in case anyone missed something or got an idea too late

So apparently there are a million Zemoo's on skype, I'm Zemoo with a red UFO sprite as my picture
also zemooGames on twitch