Sunday, October 27, 2013

Barrier Tutorial

I added a barrier tutorial to the tutorial map.

The player has to walk through a course without taking any non-shield damage.

This required two new scripting abilities: Map areas which trigger scripts and attacks which trigger scripts. Both of these new abilities will likely come in handy in the future.

Saturday, October 26, 2013

Balancing through testing

To test my formulas I created a little program to auto-generate mobs with average stats from level 5 to 100. I want to avoid this in the final version (or do I?), but for now it is a nice balancing tool.

This really helped me to file off some edges and balance my procedural barrier generation algorithm. Next one are healing spells.

Tuesday, October 22, 2013

Balancing through number-crunching


After the stressful summer with the election and my sailing hours I wanted to continue development right away, but instead of that I decided to use the distance I gained from the project to take a 2nd look on some of my code, so I was doing mostly minor cleanups and refactoring.

Then I decided that it is time to start with the content. But when I wanted to do so I realized that I had no idea what I was doing. What's a good experience yield for a Level 5 monster? How much is a spell supposed to cost? How much defense should a level 10 robe have? Just making up values on the spot would not have been wise, as I would have to balance it through trial and error. So I decided to buy some Magic Chart paper (cool stuff, by the way. It clings to any surface through electrostatics. You can easily move them around without leaving a trace. You can draw on it with dry-erase marker and just wipe it away just like on a whiteboard) and summarized all the level-dependent formulas I have.

While doing this I realized some balancing errors which would have been quite bad in practice (MP increases quadratic but MP regeneration just linear - ooops). These handy charts will make it much easier for me to make up content.