Starting Our Stats Spreadsheet

How did you find this lesson - it was long and there certain was a lot of looking at numbers!

Is it from the Zombie Runner section? I don’t see the lesson in Unity… Anybody with the same problem?

This one is from RPG. Sorry, seems that the lecture reference got eaten.

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Ok, no problem! :grin:

Hey @Rick_Davidson,
I have a general game design question that is perhaps related to this lecture. How do we go about predicting how many hours of content the game will have?

My prediction is that its down to the actual size of the maps, length of the cutscenes and length of the side quests but I’m interested in hearing your professional opinion based on your experience. Do pro devs use a similar style of spreadsheet, like a “quest” spreadsheet for example that estimates the length of quests so they can get a rough idea of how long the game is going to be?

thanks in advance!

Hey Bruce,

The approach I try to use for these things is to come up with a currency and then break things down into the units of that currency.

So for example, if you create a level or even a moment within a level, you can play through that and have a feel for the game length. For example, you make one small level and it takes 10 minutes. Then, when you are planning to make 10 levels, with some of them small and some medium, you can calculate the play time based upon your benchmark level. Or if you are using quests as your metric, you can make what you think is a typical average length quest and then use the time to complete that as your multiplier when you are planning other quests.

Hope this helps.

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Thanks for the reply @Rick_Davidson Iv written a list of about 20 quest/moment ideas so far like “fetch quest”, “murder investigation” and “ambush” I’m going to make another spread sheet that accumulates a minimum play time based on these and develop my first moment into my benchmark quest. Thanks for the advice I’m polishing up as much as I can in preparation for part 2 you guys have done a great job I’m really pleased with the course so far :grin:

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I’ve been looking forward to this part of the lecture, since I work with spreadsheets quite a bit. The solution I came up with was to download your stats into Excel, then made a VBA macro to go over each class and stat and save it in a formatted file I could simply paste into the YAML. It works for adding the player and 7 enemy types up to however many levels. I plan on making a userform to add additional enemy types and edit existing ones to add new stats.

Result file.

Here’s the module code in GitHub.
It requires an additional “Enumerations” sheet. There are two tables to link up the character classes to their placement in the characterClass Enum and the stats Enum. The other requirement is to make the stat table and Key Stat names match. I uploaded the workbook to the GitHub project, as well.

I didn’t put any protection in yet for empty elements, just check that the number of levels in row 1 all have values calculated into them for the player and each enemy type. You’ll also need to update the characterClass Enum to match the enemy types in the spreadsheet.

This was a fun solution to come up with, hopefully it can save some other people time too.

Edit: Created a UserForm for adding new enemy types with selections based on the current available stats. It adds the new enemy type, sets up the stat range based on the multiplier, then rewrites the CharacterClass.cs enum and updates the ProgressionStats.txt (although the valid character checking is missing). Next steps will be enemy editing and adding additional stats, although hooking them up in the C# methods is pretty intimidating.

Form and resulting stat table

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