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Hello,
Great course! I love the spreadsheet stuff but would argue that the xp needed to level up should be a derived value rather than being determined at the start. It might be better to start with an idea for how many kills you need for a particular level along with the xp per kill. Then you simply multiply these to get the xp needed to level up. My reasoning is that the number of kills needed to level up is something that you, the designer, want to control in order to set the pace of levelling up so this is what you should start with and the xp required per level will come out of this. The player isn’t going to care (and probably won’t notice) if this is an arbitrary-looking number like 3850 rather than a round 4000.
My other point is that you might want to think about offering experience points for actions other than just killing enemies. In particular, the completion of quests will give a lot of xp in most games and this needs to be taken into account. I realise we don’t have quests yet and this is something that can easily be added to the calculations later but just thought it was worth mentioning.
Thanks Anya, and I hope you’re well. @Rick_Davidson could you reply to my friend Anya as this is your part of ship?
Hi Anya, thanks for the great input. I agree that we could skin our xp spreadsheet cat a few different ways. Given that I’m still not sure how much gameplay-to-leveling up will be interesting I figured that the arbitrary number I’d start with would be the level up xp and then to push the other values to suit. Because our enemies will be growing in difficulty and therefore in xp awarded its a case that all numbers in our spreadsheet machine are going to be sliding around and once we play it a bit we’ll have a better idea what values to give them. I’ll have a play around with derived level-up xp as well.
And I totally agree that offering xp for other actions will be very important. Its a catch 22 as to whether we map all these out because the reality of making an indie game is we dont know which features will make it into our final game, how much content we’ll have, etc, so I tend to build out the spreadsheet for what I have now and then add and retune as we add more features. If everything is set up to automatically recalculate it shouldn’t be too much of a hassle. And of course, it helps if we have a quick way to import from spreadsheet to game - something I’ll likely be pestering Ben about in the next part of the course.
Thanks Rick!
It’ll be interesting to see how the stats pan out moving forward and just how involved they will get too with the added complexity of quests as well as all sorts of modifiers which you may or may not end up putting in there!
Also, I’m intrigued to see how you might go about importing the spreadsheet values straight into the game - that will help a ton!