This week we looked at binomial distribution. I can understand how it is useful in more strategically based mechanics and there are parts of the equation I have seen before but I don't particularly enjoy this kind of work and I have struggled to apply it. Below are the notes I made:

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

Most of this lecture was working through examples and on this occasion I didn't think it would massively help to copy these out into my own notes. I tend to be able to follow equations like this however I struggle to apply it myself. It isn't something I will personally be focussing on in my future career but I'm glad to have a very basic understanding of when it may be useful. 

​

To put this into practice we did an exercise where we designed a game idea which involved using both a dice-based mechanics system and an environment-based mechanics system. We decided to use penguins in a zoo enclosure as our example. The audience would throw fish at the penguins and they would then stack these up to escape. The first player to stack a certain amount of fish to escape the enclosure would win. Click the button below to see the other factors we included for our win state and how we assigned probabilities to our mechanics.

​

​

​

​

We only had 45 minutes for this exercise and as someone who isn't particularly interested in probabilities I found it hard to engage and understand the topic. I think our idea was good but we assigned quite a few negative factors into the game such as zookeepers and hostility from other penguins which reduced the opportunities for the player to win. Our calculations showed that there was a 0.13% chance overall that a player could win. This essentially means the player would win ~ 1/100 times and for a simple game idea like this that is incredibly low. If we had more time we could have corrected these values but unfortunately it was a bit of a trial and error process for us. I personally felt I understood it better as a concept when discussing binomial distribution within my group but I don't think I'll be trying to use it again in my free time. 

​

​

​

​

​

​