Random item from a set only once?

Hunnenkoenig

For my wallbreaker game i need bricks, which drop random bonuses.
That is not the problem. I managed that.

But now, some bonuses are coming more than once and if the situation is unlucky, they come next to eachother, which is not good for me.

For example I have a bonus, which increases the racket's width for a few seconds, but if it comes two times within this ammount of time, my racket gets too big, what I don't want.

So I need something, where I can control that the same bonus don't comes again in the same level.

I made a game boolean attribute, which will be checked, when the bonus shows up the first time, but then my random generator turns to useless.

Now it looks like this:

game.bonusX = 0
if ball hits brick, self.randombonus = random(1,5)
if self.randombonus = 3, spawn bonus X, change game.bonusX to 1

Now the problem is, I have 5 bonuses and I can't exclude bonusX and reroll for another bonus on the same brick, because the random function is not working anymore without AND or OR operators.

I have to do this with all bonuses of course and I don't want to set the bonuses fix to certain bricks due to replayability and new experience at replay.

I could make crazy long and complex rulesets, which I don't want to, so I need a simple solution.

Any idea?

JGary321

Why not just make it so that the power up can still drop, but if you are already being affected it just resets the 'timer' (duration) on the power-up? This would be a lot less complex.

Hunnenkoenig

that is a good idea.

I just found Thshirtboot's tutorial on a similar thing, with the exclusion on random.

http://gamesalad.com/game/play/26735

I will study it, maybe it is helpful.