Ah! Have we hit this point already? Yes, only 2 things done this week. But still on schedule since I was ahead last week. We’re entering into the rough patch here. Almost every thing left on the list involves significant UI work, significant changes to multiple existing systems, or large amounts of content to be both designed and implemented. If I were betting money on it, I’d say next week is when things will truly get off schedule.

Some of the work this week was about revising how rewards were dolled out. Previously enemy experience and gold were manually specified by hand to the specific amounts. What this led to was looking up a chart of appropriate values for different levels and tweaking based on how hard the enemy was relative to its intended area. One of the changes was switching to a reward level system- ie a level 5 gold reward results in 50 gold. Selections are still made relative to how difficult I feel an enemy is by setting its level, but the exact value comes from elsewhere. Now it will be much easier to tweak the reward pacing. Rank is still taken into account (each rank of the world is intended to be a big jump in costs to prevent players from gaining much value from grinding previous areas), so a rank 1 level 8 reward is still less than a rank 2 level 5 reward.

Something very similar is happening to equipment. Previously every single piece of equipment’s stats were manually specified. Naturally this led to a whole lot of looking up a chart for appropriate levels, which then led to clerical balance errors since equipment was in the format of “this style of equipment has versions 1, 2, 3 which are just straight upgrades”.  The new system will simply define an entire family of equipment’s growth across levels- with some options for additional flavor at certain levels if desired. Balance will now be much easier to tweak to perfection, though I suspect more will have to be done to equipment later to make it more interesting.

I was a little loathe to implement stuff like this because this kind of pass-the-balancing-off-to-the-computer stuff can easily go too far. For instance take this once popular (heck, maybe it’s still popular judging from most games these days) perception of how a difficulty curve should look:

The idea was that you constantly want to be challenging the player just a little bit so that they feel like they’re overcoming things, but not so much that they get frustrated and quit. This concept is, in fact, complete bullshit. The end result is that players feel bored and pandered to because the game never gets in their face and tells them that they suck, nor does it ever reward the player for getting significantly better. The game becomes forgettable because no part of it stays around long enough for the player to reflect on it. It gets even worse when you apply it to a game with even the slightest bit of non-linearity because it reduces player options to being meaningless- the cave or the castle? doesn’t matter, they’re both the same! Wouldn’t want you to get stressed and quit because we think you’re too dumb to try the other one if the first one you choose is too hard.

Moderation is key.