[VX} Having trouble with exp, levels, and difficulty.

I'm making a very short game.

It has:
1 player. Basic warrior, with a sword.
4 fields, each with 2 enemy groups. About 2-3 encounters per field.
2 Mini-bosses, 1 Final boss.
1 starting weapon, 1 purchased sword (before questing), 2 dropped swords (from mini-bosses).
1 starting armor, 1 purchased armor (before questing), 1 found armor, 1 dropped armor (from 2nd mini-boss).
I want 4 or 5 different skills. Dual attack, and then a mix of other attack skills/magic.
Max level will be about 12 or so.

Can anyone help me adjust the settings for enemies, weapon/armor rating, and my player's stats?

Going through the game, I either end up being horribly over-powered, or getting my ass kicked by one attack. The system for adjusting enemy power and such has so many variables, I'm not really sure what to do...

Help?

You say very short game, but does that mean short in the amount of time you play it in? or short in the amount of things to do in it? If the first, then I would give your enemy troops a fair amount of EXP to drop for the player to level up quicker to pass through the game at a higher pace. If the latter, then I'd make enemies more grind-able. Easy to kill, low exp but a lot of 'em.

As for something being overpowered compared to something else, that's pretty experimental. I tend to stick with low numbers. For instance, I generally start my player off with like 20HP and less than 5 of other basic stats and let the weaponry dictate how much more powerful they become rather than the stats they level with. So I give them a shallow level curve. I'm not saying that's the way to go, that's just how I generally tend to do it. But like I said, it's pretty experimental. When you test the enemy battles (which you can do from inside the database instead of having to test play the game each time) test them out with the max armor and weapons that the player could have at that moment in the game.  Also, you might want to think about strategy. If you're too strong, it's a simple "Press A a lot" game. If it's too hard, it's a "fuck this game, I'm going home" game. lol

Yeah, it takes a lot of battle testing. For what it's worth, the damage formula is:

(where attack and defense includes stats from equipment):

damage = [(4*attacker attack) - (2*target defense), 0].max
damage is then multiplied by the the element of the attack to which the target is most weak. That's a percentage.
If the damage at this point is 0, then it will randomly choose between 0 and 1 so the attack will do one damage half the time. If it's greater than 0 and if the target doesn't have prevent critical, it will check for a critical. If it gets a critical, damage is multiplied by 3.

After that, it applies a variance of 20, which works like this:
amplifier = [(absolute value of damage + 20) / 100, 0].max
damage += (random number from 0 to amplifier + 1) + (random number from 0 to amplifier + 1) - amplifier

Then, if the target is guarding, it divides damage by 2, and if the target has super guard, it divides by 4.

Thanks, guys.
I'm using this game merely as a way to present some music I wrote, so I'll be playing it live. The whole thing shouldn't last more than 14 minutes of play time. The battles don't need to be perfect, I was just having trouble figuring out why the Demon's Shade spell always did ~300 damage no matter what I did to alter how powerful it was in the editor...

Like, all that "base dmg/variance/etc" stuff was throwing me off.


Thanks, though. I'll adjust the level curve like you said, Grafikal, that's a good idea.

Lol, try not to lose in front of a crowd. =o That would blow haha

I made a spell called "Deus Ex Machina" that immediately kills everything, in case things get dicey.

lol

hahahaha that's the best thing I ever heard.