Mcadams

is this a Marsh praise thread now? i love you marsh, please be my dad

@AcidTumbleweed I hadn't realized you we're working on the game (which is why the title confused me) that's so awesome man. Congrats and good luck!

Seeing this title in the sidebar made me think there was an announcement about AGD FeelsBadMan

you're a god damn machine eric

At the moment I'm pretty sure you can't. Once the source is released you'll be able to edit how damage formulas work (and in this case scale)

nothing special

Agreed! You might've taken my post the wrong way. Percentages are still very good for game design, especially in formulas, buffs, and other means as you were saying. The point of my post was why on percent based stats were bad, such as having Critical Strike, Evasion, Blocking, and other stats have only a % instead of a numerical value. I'm sure the "magic attack %" stat in Rohan had a base numerical value, or at least a hard cap that stopped players from abusing it. Like I said, I do agree though. In my game for example, player's spells scale off either a percentage of their Spell Power stat, or a percentage of their weapon's damage, depending on their class. Static percentages are fine, but percentage based stats that are only percentages often only lead to trouble if you plan on adding new content.

That's a good system too, as long as it's not a raw % you should be fine. You have to be careful without having soft and hard caps though, because it requires you to keep track of all the sources where players can gain Agility and regulate them accordingly

What mic do you use? Sounds really good, like studio quality.

I believe the shout box appears after being registered for two weeks

Hey guys, Like many of you, I plan on making a game with Intersect in the very near future. While waiting for the source to come out, I've been doing a lot of preliminary game design, which includes making classes, skills, crafting recipes, and something I've been spending a LOT of time on, stat balancing. Great art and content are very important for a good game, but if your game, at its core, is unbalanced and lacking fundamentals, it's not going to make for a good player experience. One thing I've been working on recently are secondary stats, or the stats that your character gets only from items, and not from leveling. This can be stats like Critical Strike, damage reduction stats like Armor, or any custom stats you can make up. Let's take Critical Strike, or Crit, for example. Usually, Crit gives you a % chance to do double damage when you attack. Let's say you cap Crit in your game at 40%, so with all the best gear and buffs and whatever, you can at max have a 40% chance to Crit. Let's say in your game you have 5 Equipment slots, so each piece of gear can give up to 8% Crit. So a person with all 5 pieces of the best gear has 40% Crit. Seems all fair and balanced, right? Here's where the problem starts. For the rest of the development of your game, that gear at that time is going to make you reach the cap for Crit. So what happens if you want to release new, stronger gear? Well you could raise the cap of Crit to say, 60%, but then that gets out of hand. You can't have people running around critting everything and dealing double damage more often than not. Eventually as you make stronger items, the cap for Crit needs to go even higher, and higher, until everyone is too overpowered and content becomes too hard to balance and gets out of hand. You could just keep the cap at 40%, and all of the best gear only gives you 8% each at best, but then it doesn't really feel like your character is getting stronger with the new, "better" gear. It also makes the old gear viable, because you can reach the Crit and whatever other caps you have without ever upgrading. So how do you fix this? Instead of having a percentile number (40%) determine the hard cap for your stats, you use a exponential value. In this case, let's use 40. So now, each 1 point of Crit = 1% Crit chance. When you have 40 Crit, you'll reach the cap of 40%. Now, future content comes out, and you want to make stronger gear. Now you raise the Crit cap to 100. So now, players need to get 100 points of Crit to reach the 40%, and the 40 Crit that use to give 40% now only gives you 16%, making the old gear less powerful and allowing you to balance your items and your game without going back and changing them. In addition, the new pieces of gear that give +20 Crit each will make your character actually feel stronger, because your Crit chance is increasing back up to that 40%. This, however, creates a new problem. Say your level cap was 50, and you're increasing it to 60. You can't just have a global Crit cap for every level, or it creates this problem. Level 50 Player with 40 Crit fighting a Level 50 Monster -> 40% Crit chance *Level Cap is increased to 60 and Crit cap is increased to 100, and the player gains a level* Level 51 Player with 40 Crit fighting a Level 50 Monster -> 16% Crit Chance "What the hell? I just leveled up and got WEAKER!" Well, yeah, you sorta did. Since the Crit cap was increased to 100, your existing gear was made worse so that the new gear could be better than it. How to fix this Instead of having a 'global' Crit cap, have the Crit cap increase only for people leveling up past the old level. So, for levels 1-50, you need 40 Crit for a 40% chance to crit on monsters your level. and for levels 50-60, you need 100 Crit for a 40% chance to crit on monsters your level. So now, a level 50 fighting a level 50 with 40 Crit still has a 40% chance, so he won't feel like he got weaker because you had to up the Crit cap. This means: max Crit points on level 50 gear - 40 = 40% chance to crit on a level 50 monster max Crit points on level 60 gear - 100 = 40% chance to crit on a level 60 monster Using this system, you can easily balance old, current, and future content, by simply upping the maximum caps for the new gear and levels you're creating, without any detriment to the player. They'll feel like they're getting stronger as they progress through new content, and they'll still feel strong when fighting older, lesser monsters. I hope this quick writeup gives you guys some insight into my philosophy on game design and how to better manage your player's growth for the now and for the future. If you have any questions or would like some parts cleared up feel free to let me know in a reply or a PM. Thanks for reading.

"Mourningwood" You might want to uh ... nvm

Excellent write up man. We need more posts on here like this. Hopefully other users take the time to check this out; though I knew most of this myself a lot of other amateur developers can avoid game breaking mistakes knowing how to handle their games balancing and economy

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I would definitely take advantage of the event system to make more dynamic conversations. You can use a bunch of switches to check if events have occurred or not which effect how the npc talks to you. One example would be like if the NPC is someone's father, and you saved their son or daughter in a dungeon or something, they'd talk to you with more praise and enthusiasm than someone who didn't. There's a lot of cool stuff you can do with the event system, and even little details like that make the NPC-player discussions feel a lot more lively and less mundane. Like I said, that's just one small simple example, there are much more intricate and interesting things that could be done.

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i think the politically correct term is African American mage

i am actually an orc irl ;/

true jc? please?

nope lurv

Insane as usual JC

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