This will be a pretty quick blog post that takes a look into how many different paths exist in Hush Hush. Some assumptions will have to be made, but the final result should be at least the correct order of magnitude (ish). Let’s get started!
The first thing we need to do is figure out how many choices a user has in an asset. To figure this out, I’m going to write a little AI that just randomly plays each Hush Hush asset 1,000 times, and compute an average number of decisions the player has to make. That outputs something like this:
Averaged 11.483 choices in Bonnibel Date 1.csv
Averaged 7.561 choices in Bonnibel Date 2.csv
Averaged 2.252 choices in Bonnibel Date 3.csv
Each choice is generally one of 3 options, so that means that we can translate these numbers to unique paths by taking 3 to the power of the average number of choices. Note: This isn’t perfect, because this will just give the number of paths of an average play session. This is an exponential function, which means we can vary by a lot with each additional choice made in a date. This would give something like the following for number of unique paths:
Averaged 301,150 unique paths in Bonnibel Date 1.csv
Averaged 4,050 unique paths in Bonnibel Date 2.csv
Averaged 12 unique paths in Bonnibel Date 3.csv
Next, we’ll need to process the action list, which is a list of all of the different things a player can do in the game for each time slot. We’ll need to calculate the total number of paths possible at each time slot, and then multiply that by the other time slots.
Some time slots are easy. For example, if a time slot is only a job/skill (typically night or dawn) then we can calculate the paths pretty easily. A night time slot (when both light and dark karma jobs/skills are available) has 20 different options. A dawn time slot (when only light karma jobs/skills are available) has only 10 different options.
Some time slots are pretty hard, and contain a mixture of mini events, events and phone messages. I’ve assumed the player will read every phone message, and will also pick a random number of mini events, before picking an actual event at random.
After some number crunching, this results in around 1.34*10^62 unique paths for jobs and skills, another 4.08*10^229 unique paths for events (such as dates, intros and other purple items on the map), and then another 1.28*10^279 unique paths for everything else (phone messages and mini events). Multiplying these together suggests there are approximately 7*10^570 different paths (that’s 7 followed by 570 zeros). Assuming the Universe has around 10^82 atoms in it, then there are 7*10^487 times as many paths in Hush Hush as there are atoms in the Universe.
That being said, that doesn’t mean there are 7*10^570 unique outcomes to Hush Hush. Some paths collapse back together and often the choice you make for a job or skill doesn’t matter too much. For example, there’s no difference between picking burgers at night and solar tech in the morning, versus solar tech at night and burgers in the morning. But it does give an interesting insight into the magnitude of numbers in the game.Hopefully you found this interesting, and I hope you enjoy Hush Hush!
~Programmer Panda
Sad Panda Studios 