But… The mouse on the end of the string could bounce in any direction based on the motion you produce with the stick. So, in effect, there’s infinite variation.
But how many of those variations are effectively the same? There’s really not that much variety. Cat goes left, cat goes right, cat gets bored.
The cat should be allowed to select from different wands, strings, and attachable toys, then play in randomly generated arenas with different treat loadouts and procedurally generated hiding spots.
Anything less is just bad game design.
I’m not sure I can afford a randomly generating House, no matter how much the cat wants it!
You are the rouguelike element. You are supposed to make it different and interesting every time
Where’s the content?
The last update was almost 15 days ago, I want new weapons!Also, the ‘pulling it up too high’ meta is so unfair. Where is the balance patch?
Not enough procederal generation slop.
Wouldn’t the play experience of a dangling cat toy be different every time given the randomness of the toy’s trajectory once impacted by the feline’s paw?
Even as a single pendulum there’s a huge number of possible trajectories it could take, making it effectively random from our perspective.
A simple pendulum is actually a chaotic system in the real world (everything is, for the most part). It’s extremely sensitive to initial conditions. Even microscopically small differences in how hard the cat swipes, the exact angle of impact, tiny air currents, or imperceptible vibrations in your hand holding the toy all get amplified exponentially over time into completely different swing patterns.
The phase space is basically the map of all possible positions and velocities the toy could have. It contains an astronomically large number of distinct states it can pass through. We’re talking numbers so large they’re bounded only by physical limits like the Bekenstein bound. The path through these states depends on initial conditions we simply cannot measure precisely enough, plus constant perturbations from the environment (thermal fluctuations, air resistance, microscopic imperfections in the string).
Add to this that cat toy strings aren’t perfectly flexible. They have some rigidity and internal friction that creates additional complexity and damping. This makes the system even less predictable because the energy dissipates in chaotic ways.
Whether the underlying universe is truly random (quantum indeterminacy) or just deterministically chaotic beyond our ability to measure doesn’t matter for practical purposes. The computational precision required to predict the trajectory exceeds what’s physically possible to measure.
For all intents and purposes, every swat creates a genuinely unpredictable and effectively random experience for the cat.
No, it’s always the same. The “every run is different” in roguelikes is just an illusion, you just are playing with the same patterns over and over till “that” you are waiting for happen, like gambling.
How dare you liken roguelites to dark patterns!
