Punching to the Score

Working your way through the conversation is simple enough, but I know that there are a number of people out there who have to get a perfect score. With that in mind, I will explain how the episode is scored for those people. While the official scoring table is technically correct, how it was actually implemented in the game is different so I will explain how the scoring was coded for those who are interested in such trivia.

• +5 points for only being punched once. It is possible to be punched twice and still complete the episode. Being punched for a third time will result in losing the game.
• +5 points for inquiring about Gartony.
• +5 points for inquiring about Jack (who are you).
• +5 points for inquiring about Jack's Associates.
• +5 points for inquiring about Charles.

Implementing the scoring is simply the matter of flagging the four conversation topics that award points then when the score is being calculated adding 5 points for each of the flags that were set. This works fine for 20 of the 25 points, but the punching needs to be treated slightly different. Sometimes when you are in a rush to finish something, you don't entirely think things through properly. Instead of doing the obvious test:

if (hitcount < 2)
score += 5;

I instead coded the punch scoring as follows:

var finalScore = 10; // base score
finalScore -= (5 * hitcount); // less 5 per hit so starting score is 0 or 5

It was a while since I wrote this code but I believe that I was originally going to have a score even if the player died (with -5 for dying). After writing the code I probably decided that it was not logical to give a dead player a score.