So soon? Must be progress! Hey, who wants to get back to updates where I ramble on about technical stuff? You? Perfect! As mentioned in my last update I'm still working out how I want to accomplish a few things, and I have some ideas. What it comes down to is I don't want to change how the player perceives combat, but I'd like to make changes under the hood to how results are produced. That way the game remains faithful, but also allows me to make the sort of mechanic changes that interest me. But, in order to do so I have to have some idea of how these changes would work in a game setting. How do I do that? Microsoft Excel.
Oooh lah lah, check out those assumptions!
Right now I'm mulling around an idea of
proficiency. The basics are like FF2 or Skyrim, use a weapon or type of magic and slowly you improve with it. This is all part of a much larger bunch of ideas so for now just consider proficiency to be a reflection of accuracy and damage potential. Now, the thing is, I know what I want it to do but how long will it take the player to improve? What level should they start at? What rate of increase should I use? These answers aren't easy to examine without tackling something else first: levels.
In FF the player can reach level 50, but it's common knowledge it's mostly a grind after that and the game can be beat around the 30 level mark. So I made two observations: the player could reasonably be expected to complete the game at level 30 and they should have gained 333651 experience points to get there. To tweak the curve, and as a control, I chose level 10 as a nice low point where the player should have earned 11116. From these requirements I was able to produce a growth curve that indicates at any given level how much XP the player should have gained. The last piece of the puzzle is how many battles the player would need to fight to reach level 50. Of course, this is just an estimation but it is based on the idea of the number of battles rising alongside with levels. This may sound imprecise but consider this: RPGs tend to have a inherent 'correction' for under and over leveled characters. Namely that as you 'fall behind' a single victory is worth more, and speeds up progress, while the higher you are the less a victory matters and progress slows. Generally if the player progresses forwards, unless they choose to grind out, this isn't a terrible prediction and it's still better than guessing.
Besides, that can always be tweaked if the numbers it produces look wrong or I find out I was totally wrong on implementation. So now we start getting into the meat of this spreadsheet. Based on the given assumptions and the XP curve, I can theorize how many of those 'total' battles you've completed, and given a set of assumptions about how much proficiency XP you might be expected to earn in a given scenario, figure out how many levels you could be expected to reach in order to achieve a specific proficiency. This is quite important because the only other way to test this information would be to literally grind it out in game and see what happens. I can take data from the engine to make my assumptions, but this is a good way to get a picture of it. In fact, once we know these growth curves we can even plot it to see what the entire curve would look like:
This shows variations in the XP scale the player expects to be at assuming the maximum attainable XP.
Given all these tools it's much easier to tweak numbers and see just how a change is going to affect the overall outcome. Now, there are some things to consider when doing this and the major one is pretty obvious: your assumptions are only as good as your data! On paper this could look very nice, but if I've left out or overlooked a particularly important variable, the final result could be completely off. The other issue is consistency: these numbers work as long as I maintain that methodology throughout. It might surprise you to find out, but when designers are working on an RPG they often treat levelling as a function of
time and not of experience or numbers of battles fought. They decide how long they think the player should invest to reach the next level and plan content according to that. The results of this going awry are players figuring out how to maximize their gains within that time by exploiting outliers. A famous example for me would be FF speed runs where the RNG is manipulated to produce an exceptionally high number of ogre fights to maximize gold and XP. I digress, for me I'm going with a slightly stranger metric: number of fights I expect the player to be involved in.
So what am I doing with this information? It might sound strange but FF is almost entirely combat when you get down to it. The problem is too much,
or too little, can make the game uninteresting or boring. Referring to the chart we can see at level 30 I can reasonably expect the player to have fought 371 battles. Given that I consider this to be a fine 'end game' level, I can then extrapolate how many battles, given a defined rate of progress, what proficiency they would attain with a single weapon type from a starting rating. In this case, the graph depicts a FIGHTER could reasonably expect to max out a weapon around 30 levels. Pretty darn close to what I'd like to see. I then tweak the scaling curve for the weaponry to see how each class responds and where I personally feel they should end up. For example, to take a weapon from F class to SSS class would require 40 levels. Given the FIGHTER is a weapons expert and has a 15% bonus to growth, this seems about right. Let's look at what the Black Mage might look like:
The Black Mage, is not primarily a melee class and therefore the assumptions reflects as such.
Looking at this we can see that, really, the Black Mage can be expected to never master a particular weapon type. This is based on the assumption that they will not only perform less melee attacks than the fighting classes, but that their low accuracy and damage means they'll be responsible for less kills as well. Looking at these numbers I can say this seems satisfactory. If you ground it out because you wanted to, specialized your caster or performed some other action to improve their XP gain, yes, they would faster. But under 'normal' circumstances, it's likely a Black Mage would reach level 30 with a B or A rank with their weapon. Sounds about right to me.
At this point you've probably moved on from reading this but let's say you stuck around and you have a question: what is the point of doing this? What is 'proficiency'? The idea is pretty simple, in FF your character generates a number between 0 and 255 based on factors such as strength and accuracy. I currently use a specific algorithm for magic to determine effectiveness based on character INT and spell power. Basically proficiency would be a stand in for spell power for melee attackers and allow them to have a similar rate of increase for their skills. One of the issues I'm trying to address is that FF like most RPGs and especially those of it's time are very linear progressions in power. While it's definitely cool to find a new sword or upgrade your armor, relying solely on this activity does not make for compelling turn-based combat. As I said in the opening, I want the game to look and feel much the same to the player while still redefining the underlying characteristics to produce a more adventure-focused adventure, and combat-focused combat but those things will be saved for another day.