Spreadsheet Tuning Numbers

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#1

So I had a hard time with this one. I’m not a math wizard by any means, so I don’t know any variable formulas to get gradient results, so I just tried to keep it as simple as I could.

With keeping with that in mind, I didn’t think the numbers between
EXP to Level Up - EXP per Enemy kill - Enemies to Kill to Lvl Up - Damage (both Player and Weapon)
Should all be directly related to each other. Editing one of them shouldn’t drive the others. At least I couldn’t figure out a good way to do it, but on to what I did.

I used
EXP per Enemy kill * Enemies to Kill to Lvl Up = EXP to Lvl Up
and I used
Damage (both Player and Weapon) * # of hits to Kill = Enemy Base health @ lvl of the Player
to get some good game tuning BUT… only for lvl 10 and above.
I thought manual editing of the players interaction between the mobs and the rewards for those interactions (under lvl 10), would be heavily scripted encounters to show gameplay, combat, and mechanics. And I just couldn’t tune the spreadsheet for those game moments under level 10.

Here is a copy of “only” levels 1 -20. I tried to keep the numbers small as well, because a sword doing 40 damage at lvl 10 and adding 10 more damage every lvl as the player leveled up seemed like fun at the start, but that made the enemies have over 7000 hit points at lvl 100. And I wanted to keep character progression something that you couldn’t lvl past (example - Reach Max Lvl).
You can change the Values in the dark Blue Fields on the left to drive the data in the chart.

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Enemies Data

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Relationship Graphs

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You will notice the enemies (Archer & Mage) aren’t doing any damage to the players at lvl 1. Again… the player is starting out, learning mechanics, and going through a tutorial as well probably, so scripted events can be individually tuned to fit.

The main take aways I hoped to share with others who are also starting out are

  • Pick a game level that everything should be running smoothly at (mid game probably), and then tune to fit.
  • Keep relationships simple to understand for your first game (for the player and yourself :sunglasses:)
  • You can always add more complexity and layered relationships when you learn more or are more confident in your skills.
  • You don’t have to be super good at math to have memorable fun adventures
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#2

Good job, it looks like you’ve put a lot of work into this.
Tuning progression and advancement is an arduous task, whether by hand tuning, formulas or both (I use formulas, and it’s an interesting struggle to keep things in tune. Nothing like having the formula give a perfect progression from level 1-5 only to find that suddenly your oneshotting enemies at level 6.

Once you start introducing stat modifiers on equipment in Inventory, you’ll find you’ll need to tune even more. :slight_smile:

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#3

Given that many games level cap way before 100, having a level 100 enemy seems pretty much being a boss fight event…

Also, there are some games that keep numbers for anything under tight control while others have them fairly inflationary. Some are strongly focused on attack combos, so even at higher levels the base attacks might still be fairly low, and it’s the combo multipliers that make the player powerful…
(and a +1 bonus might be quite lame on the base damage, but be really powerful if applied to some multiplier instead…)

And while all this feels a bit daunting, it results in a wide variety of possible implementations for different games.

And if there were that one perfect progression formula, everyone would be using it, and things would become pretty boring rather quickly…

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