Coming Soon: Emergency Mode

Myriavora launched on Monday, July 5th, 2021 and there has been a content update every Monday since. But there won't be one today. The reason for that is rather weird and requires some explanation, but the short story is: I'm working on a new feature that I call Emergency Mode and I'll need a few weeks to properly implement and test it. There won't be any regular updates until it's done.

For the long story, we'll first need to take a look at Myriavora's world map.

This screenshot is from my replay on the Infestation: Best Journey leaderboard. The replay comprises all 68 camps that are currently in the game. They cover roughly two thirds of the world map, so if I keep adding camps at this rate, I'll end up at about 100 camps in the final version.

I play this journey on the hardest difficulty level (Hero), and so far it resulted in a total score of just over 500 million. I didn't try very hard to achieve good scores most of the time, and with so many camps yet to come I estimate an experienced player to typically reach a total score of around 1 billion once the game is complete. Battles are generated procedurally, so with some luck and dedication, 2 billion might be achievable.

This got me worried! You see, Steamworks leaderboards use a 32 bit signed integer field to store scores, so the maximum value is just over 2 billion (2^31−1 or 2,147,483,647 to be exact). That's way too close. If you'd manage to exceed that limit, your score would roll over and become negative.

Now, let me be perfectly clear that this is only an issue for the Infestation scenario. In Doomsday, you ever only get to fight at most seven battles, no matter how many camps there are. Yes, due to the much higher journey perks you tend to get much higher scores in the course of these seven battles, but I don't think you can get even close to 2 billion. My current Doomday high score is about 450 million, and that's after dozens of tries. I'm sure a talented and determined player can beat that score but certainly not double, let alone quadruple it.

So, how did this become a problem in the Infestation scenario? Why didn't I realize there's an issue sooner? Well, actually I did. The game has been storing scores internally as 64 bit integers for years now. Those have limits in the quintillions and there's no way to exceed that whatsoever. This is not a new technology by any stretch of the imagination, so when I brought Myriavora to Steam, I fully expected the leaderboards to support 64 bit integers as well, but much to my disappointment they don't.

I had no choice but to make some adjustments. For example, early versions of my game had a score multiplier that increased every few waves. I had to ditch it. I also edited the score tables for all spider types. But most importantly, I introduced a sleep mechanic to the Infestation scenario with the intention to only offer leaderboards for Best Battle and Best Day. And those boards will indeed never have a problem with the score limit due to their much smaller scope.

Unfortunately, I later decided to add the Best Journey board anyway. This was way before launch day, when the game only had twelve camps and I didn't have a clear idea of how many would be in the final version. I thought, if need