Units of Measurement
Posted by James on April 21, 2010 under Tasty Planet | 
10 Comments to Read
Tasty Planet is a game of scale. The player eats everything from the tiniest things to the biggest things in the universe. In Tasty Planet 1 the current size and goal size of the goo are displayed in the HUD. The game picks the most appropriate unit of measurement to use from the following list (some are never used because the goo never gets to the appropriate size):
- Picometers (pm)
- Nanometers (nm)
- Micrometers (um)
- Millimeters (mm)
- Centimeters (cm)
- Meters (m)
- Kilometers (km)
- Megameters (Mm)
- Gigameters (Gm)
- Astronomical Unit (au)
- Kilo Astronomical Unit (kau)
- Parsec (pc)
- Kiloparsec (kpc)
- Megaparsec (Mpc)
- Gigaparsec (Gpc)
- Teraparsec (Tpc)
- Pentaparsec (Ppc)
- Exaparsec (Epc)
As you can see, the smaller units are all metric system, while the larger units are commonly used units in Astronomy (no lightyears because they are so close to the size of parsecs).
My main concern with these units is that a large portion of players (those from the United States) are more familiar with inches and feet than with centimeters and meters. That said, I think that I’m going to use the same units in Tasty Planet 2, but I’m planning on displaying the full name of the unit, instead of just the abbreviation. That way, even if some Americans might not know what a “km” is, I think they are more likely to have an idea what a “kilometer” is. Similarly, no one knows what a “pc” is, but they will probably at least recognize “parsec” from episodes of Star Trek.
Here is an image of a ruler tool that I added to the level editor, it lets me measure the size of objects so that I can easily set them to a realistic size. As you can see the mushroom is about 7.77 centimeters in diameter (about 3 inches).
