Timers are a great way to make a room more challenging and clever. While tarstuff and roach queens work very well and predictably, the architect needs to put in some mechanism to kill the mother and babies or queen and roaches, which can be messy or even impossible to put in a room. A much simpler timer is just a briar root in a long, one-tile corridor far away from the goal. The player must reach the goal in time or else the briar will have blocked it or destroyed it.
It's a useful and simple system, to be sure. The briar doesn't need to die at the end, and it's obviously a timer and not some other room mechanic. But the problem with briar timers is two-fold: not using pits means the briar grows too quickly, while using pits means the briar doesn't grow in a predictable pattern. For example, with a tar mother growing to block something, it's easy to see her progress and how much time is left at any point: you have thirty times the length of the corridor turns left. But briar doesn't grow linearly, making it much harder to predict off the top of one's head.
Fortunately, there is a pattern, and a fairly simple one, too. It is:
t(d) = 0.5d^2 - 0.5d + 1
where t is turns left and d is distance of the corridor. With this equation handy, it shouldn't be too hard for a player to figure out how much time they have to beat a timer, or for an architect to figure out how long a timer corridor should be.
I hope this was a bit helpful to anyone who read this. It certainly helped me make a timer without guessing the corridor length.
____________________________
It was going well until it exploded.
~Scott Manley
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[Last edited by 12th Archivist at 11-24-2013 07:27 PM]
