This is for all the people who, like me, are terrible at doing math in their heads.
I've been looking for a more simplified pace calculator, as the ones available now are either:
1. Too "high maintenance", requiring constant and very distracting live data entry throughout a game,
2. Too demanding of specific data for a game where you just want a quick but reasonably accurate estimate of pace,
3. Only usable with MAME (Pauline.exe), and of no use to arcade-machine players,
OR
4. Lacking in the ability to quickly measure what a final score might be if the player were to increase or decrease his pace.
I wanted one where I could just plug in a score, the level and screen, and immediately know the pace, without needing a start score or any other numbers.
Since I couldn't find such a thing, I made one myself.
This is an Excel (2003) worksheet. I went with Excel because it was the quickest way for me to get to a finished product. I haven't learned how to code such a thing into a webpage.
I hammered this out relatively quickly, so it's "version 1.0". It aint pretty, but it should be self-explanatory: enter your data (your score at the last completed screen, and what that screen was) into the dark gray boxes and a table of projected kill screen scores (listed by score-per-level for the remainder of the game) will appear in the light gray boxes. (It'll also tell you the specific screen # that you're on.)
You can also enter your start score and the sheet will calculate your average-per-level so far and give you your projected kill screen score if you continue at that average. (The "Start" field is optional - enter "0" to blank if out.)
I saved the file with data already plugged into the fields as an example. The data comes from an actual game of DK. If you can identify the game, congratulations, you are a DK supernerd!
Strengths:
1. It's fast and very simple, which was the point. There is very little data to enter, so you can quickly input your numbers during a game. You can also "catch up" at any time - if you miss a screen, or four, or twenty, it doesn't matter. All you need is your score at the last screen completion.
2. It projects your maximum scoring potential if you were to raise, lower, or maintain your current pace. No other calculator that I know of does this, and this is actually pretty important, since, in practice, players will raise or lower their pace during the game for many reasons and need to get an idea of what score they'll end up with if they do so. Other pace calculators assume that you'll keep going with the same averages. This will tell you where you'll end up if you want to shift gears from 53K double-hammer levels to 45K "running board" levels (or the other way around: you've been running boards the whole time and now you want to know how much ground you could make up if you started totally shredding ass).
Weaknesses:
1. Big flaw #1 is that calculations for an as-yet incomplete level are a little rough, because the formula calculates based on the average of ALL post-L4 screens and doesn't differentiate by screen type. Obviously this will throw things off, more or less depending on where you are in the level, as scoring is not uniform by screen type (especially at higher pace where it's weighted heavily toward barrels). But after the sixth screen, when the level ends, the number will be clean and accurate.
2. Big flaw #2 is deaths. The pace calculation doesn't add theoretical points for deaths still to come, and deaths that HAVE occurred will create the opposite problem by artifically inflating the score, and thus, the per-level average. However, it won't throw things off by TOO much, especially if your deaths are low value, and/or happen later in the game.
I thought about working something into the formulas to fix both of these problems, or including cells for deaths, but I'll let it be.
In practice, we all know that pace is in constant flux and is ALWAYS a ballpark figure.
We also know that after we get killed we're going to be too busy screaming and kicking the machine to write down how much we got for the death that just happened.
The point here isn't to be needle accurate, the point is to have something we can punch some simple numbers into every now and then during a game and get a rough estimate of where we are.
