Return to Numbers Land

[bnewman]

Back in 7th grade, instead of math class, I wrote a console-style RPG for the Apple ][. It was called Numbers Land, and it allowed players to learn practice arithmetic while fighting low-res creatures across a fantasy world a sprawling eight tiles across. The 5th graders who played it compared it favorably with Number Munchers, which is high praise indeed.

It's been many years, and that 5¼" disc is around somewhere but probably long-since demagnetized, but I still keep Numbers Land on the list of things I'd like to do — better next time.

Better graphics. A bigger world. More creatures. More variation in the type and difficulty of math. More plot. More Phantom Tollbooth-esque puns — oh, yes, from the hills of Additon to the ice caves of Subterra, from the Great Divide to the plains of Cartesia, from the ruins of ancient Numer to the mysteries of an Alien Base, not to mention the Factory hidden deep in the heart of the Prime Ordeal Jungle, fighting adders and multiplythons, percentaurs and decimators, hippopotenuses and isosceletons, rangers and meanies... the whole game will be like this.

Two large, unsolved questions of "how" prevent me from starting in on a new version of Numbers Land right away. One is a question of development tools. I'm sure there are toolkits out there for building games like this in, say, Java, but I don't know which are the good ones that will meet my needs.

The second, and more interesting, question is how, once there is more than one kind and difficulty level of math problem, to keep the game balanced — especially given that players will definitely have a range of skill levels and will probably not all have the same background in terms of math concepts, even if they mostly fall into a narrow range of grade levels. I have a few ideas in this area, which I'll explain in a later post along with more details of how I imagine the combat system working.

If you have any suggestions, or if you want to help in a concrete way, let me know!

Comments

[sen-ichi-rei.livejournal.com]

There was some number game I played a while back (like 2nd grade) which took place in outer space and had all these levels and was really cool. I forget what it was called...

Anyways, you could set it to having different types of math problems. The game play was still the same, but you were working with different equations. Could you do something like that?

[orawnzva.livejournal.com]

Are you thinking of Math Blaster, by any chance?

It's easy to figure out how to implement different kinds of problems. What's hard is figuring out how to adapt the game to players with different backgrounds. In Math Blaster or Number Munchers, each type of problem is a separate, self-contained challenge (a level), and there's no overall plot that depends on them. In Numbers Land, each math concept is thematically associated with a region of the game world, so you wouldn't be able to leave any out without dropping parts of the plot.

[god-of-belac.livejournal.com]

About game balance, why not handle it like X-Com or Civilization? At game's beginning, you choose a difficulty level which globally affects the kind of problems you're faced with.