What Is The Best Number Of Basketballs?

Hello everyone! I’m Dave, and to celebrate my third week at HakJak I’ve got an update for you from the narrative design front.

Here’s a scenario I ran into recently:

• The Player meets an NPC on top of a building.

• The Player chooses to ask the NPC if they have any cool gadgets to offer.

• The NPC does not, but after fishing around in their pocket (the NPC is a pigeon) they reward the Player with X number of basketballs instead.

Okay, so how many b-balls are we talking about?

Since this is a critical question that will make or break the success of the game, I thought I’d devote a post to breaking down my thought process.

The first number that comes to mind, of course, is three—the classic comedy go-to and the namesake of the Rule of Three. But take a look below. To my eyes, three basketballs feels a bit sparse surrounded by all that bare roof. Nevermind the fact that no one in existence needs to possess more than one basketball at a time, we still have a powerful game engine at our disposal. Let’s use it.

So we can safely eliminate the three from contention. Too small. At the other end of the spectrum we have 3500, a number that many will recognize as the Guinness world record for the most toothpicks inserted into a beard. I had high hopes for this one. I really did. But while it technically worked, it froze the game for fifteen seconds and spawned the basketballs in a circular pattern that looked like an aerial view of Burning Man attended only by sports equipment.

But at least we’re making progress. Our target number is somewhere between three and 3500. Too many basketballs and it breaks the game; too few and we’re left hungry for more basketballs.

So how many basketballs did I go with? You’ll have to play the game to find out! In the meantime, I’d like to hear the number of basketballs you’d choose to spawn and why. The person with the closest guess to what I went with wins an autographed copy of LeBron James.