Hi there, I thought I would try my hand at putting a few ideas online. These are ideas that I really want to talk about but don't seem to find the time to talk about. They might also be concepts that I do get to talk about from time to time, but don't get to go into as much depth as I would like. I imagine this will often look at game design, but I might go into other topics too.
Tactical Game Systems Design
My brother and I grew up on tactical games like Shining Force or Final Fantasy Tactics Advance. They were some of our favorite games, and still something we enjoy today with games like Divinity: Original Sin, XCom and Into the Breach. In many ways it feels like the next version of chess, where you don’t have any mechanical skills to check against and you can plan out the perfect set of moves. It’s an overlay of game systems all interacting with each other in an action setting.
We have always had one main problem with this though, and it’s that you can often know that the fight is over before the game does. This often ends with you surrounding a single enemy while each of your units take turns hitting him over the head. We often talked about making our own that focused more on push and pull mechanics, where you would knock your opponents into traps and hazards rather than doing direct damage.
I won’t be going into many details because this is something that we hope to create in the future, but I did want to talk about some of my systems design work on the game. This started as an assignment for my systems design class, but I loved doing it so much that I ended up build a rough combat simulator that you can try yourself.
Where the simulator takes data from the other sheets such as character base stats, level, death penalties, spaces on the map that provide buffs, and items so that you can simulate a 1 on 1 fight against a single enemy. Your able to set the level of both characters and and give the player’s an item The simulator will let you know who is favored to win the match and the average damage done with each hit. But where it really gets interesting is the code behind it where you could act out a fight turn by turn. This gives the designer a real chance to play with the numbers and how they feel rather than just some numbers in a spread sheet.
I started by assigning gold values to each stat in the game, and building a level 1 protection warrior class to see what the average stats of a character should look like this was used to create the template for the remaining 14 classes.
I then did the same thing for 4 different enemy types (and left room for a 5th custom enemy) these pulled from the same stat table. I started working on the simulator because I felt it was really important to testing how each class felt (Was hit chance to high, did crit value need to change ect.) I had set up a loot table and decided to have it roll to see if anything would drop after the enemy had fallen. This was very helpful because a drop chance of 5% could be just fine in some situations but a huge pain in others. So this helped give me a better idea of what these values should be at.
Later on I added in a leveling system with stat growth per level, and a new stat (dodge) this was a decent chunk of work because I already had things set up, and needed to now redo damage formulas. Though it was fun to do, and made the experience much better. It meant that I could let hit chance go above 100% without needing a bunch of extra time balancing for if that were to happen. Leveling also helped show me where the system starts to break down, I had balanced for levels 1-10 but wanted to see what it would look like if we went higher, we saw things like hit chance, and damage reduction had started becoming ridiculous without the inclusion of diminishing returns (something we didn’t want to include as to keep the math simple for the player). We started thinking about it as if the player would cap at level 10, but that some enemies could go higher.
The next step is to add movement to the simulation, currently range and move speed aren’t taken into account, and while we don’t plan to simulate everything (it’s already getting to the point where we should be putting it in game) an idea on how range, movement and push/pull effects play out will go a long way painting a clearer picture of us to look at when doing content design.
If you want to check out the spread sheet and simulator you can open it at this link here. If you want to use the simulator itself you will need to be logged a gmail account and allow the java script to run when you click one of the buttons.