The other day I threw a paper ball across my room and scored! This always feels good when done spontaneously but with each attempt there are diminishing returns (it gets boring quickly). However, being a game design nerd I found myself creating rules to spice it up; I started off by introducing a scoring system, with special bonuses for rebounds, but this became silly and overly-complicated for very little "spice".
I then had the idea of scoring each round by squaring the number of balls scored in that round; add in the requisite that the score for all rounds must total at least the square of the last round-number (1 for round 1, 4 for round 2, 9 for round 3, etc.), and we have introduced a natural difficulty curve!
The scoring system keeps the game interesting because one big round can change a poor run into a good one. You might go from just scraping through the third round with 9 (after scoring 1 and 4 in the first two rounds), to scoring 25 the next round and shooting up to 34!
I have been playing with 5 balls and my best score so far is 104. Maybe try this game out yourself or code a small game with the same quadratic scoring system and tell me if you think it's fun (at least more fun than just throwing paper balls). Maybe you can even improve it.
\r\nFormerly OBese87.
