Exponent | Hacker News Reader

Exponent

mamota.net

19 pointsbpierre16 comments

Creator here. Surprised to see this on HN. This was about a morning's work, intended as a joke incremental game. Please don't judge it too seriously.

It would be great to see the formula for the cost for exponents as well. How do you calculate/increase it?

It is close to 1.5 times, but not quite, it grows slowly.

[Here's the formula](https://github.com/fredley/exponent/blob/master/main.js#L64), I came up with a basic exponential growth equation and tweaked it so that the speed of growth felt about right.

You are a horrible person, but I finally achieved my goal.

http://imgur.com/7tcfZXZ

My most interesting finding was that we started losing precision before switching to exponentional notation. The former happened around the 10^17 mark, the latter around the 10^19 mark.

Nice work. I really like the simplicity of it.

The best strategy I've been able to come up with grows the exponent roughly every 50s: 47s to get to 100, 51s to 1415, and so on. I wonder if there's a way to do it faster.

AFAICT, the best strategy is to get each factor to 2 as quickly as possible.

At least in the area of 10^15, it takes about N to click on 2x10^i and 4N to click on 1x10^(i+1). Since clicking on 2x10^i approximately halves the time to get to 1x10^(i+1), then it takes N + 4N/2 to get to 1x10^(i+1) if you click on 2x10^i first. 3x10^i is an additional 3N. N + 3N/2 + 4N/3 = 3.8N.

If you'd like to be mean, make it so there's one way to win, by hitting a certain large score exactly (if you jump over it, you lose), and then have it report the time to get there.

It's like the raw mechanic of Cookie Clicker, sans cookies. And every other game like it. Nice distillation.

Kind of reminds me of Clicking Bad: http://clickingbad.nullism.com/

What's up with the nowrap CSS? On my iPad, it shows only x10^4 in portrait mode and 10^6 in landscape.

You should be able to scroll the div horizontally

there is an obvious conspiracy against developers to just prevent them from working in peace.

any way to guess how the cost are calculated ?

Is it actually possible to lose the game?

It's not even possible to win.

Well, surviving is winning, right?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com