Legacy of Suns

This is a bit late (I didn’t have the website made in time), but this Dev Log is for Thursday January 11th.

First off, welcome to the Dev Logs! These are meant to show everything I work on in a way that shows how much thought and time and creativity goes into making a game.

Today’s focus was on math. So much fun, right?

One thing I felt I needed to do before I get into the meat of what abilities do, what stats affect, and how much damage an attack can do, I figured I needed to determine how much experience points you need to level up. Not only that, how often should you level up? How much should a character’s power increase (on average) on a level up? When a character levels up, do their equipped classes level up too, or is that going to be a separate value?

So that’s where the math comes in. I calculated for the story I want to make, I would assume the average player is playing my game for 24-35 hours, depending on side content completed. I also decided that, on average, I want a level up to happen every 20 minutes. Why every 20 minutes? I wish I had a great answer, it just seemed like a good chunk of time, and with turn based games, people love to grind for levels in the most optimal spots, and 20 minutes (on average) seemed like a fair amount of time so that power optimizers can’t abuse it TOO much (I hear you all I am one of you).

So with that being said, if a player is playing the game such that it takes them 24 hours to beat (or get to the final boss), that means there’s 72 level ups I should try to account for in the main story.

After determining that, I decided that I wanted a level up to increase the character’s average power level by 15%. I felt this is a good amount of power per level so that players can feel engaged and it can stay fun without getting too overpowered. Who knows, maybe I’ll eat those words once I start testing this.

With a 15% increase of power, I wanted the XP required to match that. I decided that each level up should require 15% more XP than the last one. The math ended up hurting my brain only a little bit, and when I think about what I came up with sometimes it still doesn’t sit right in my head, so I may revisit these numbers going forward.

I then thought about, are the characters levelling up independently of the classes, or are they together? If a character can switch classes whenever they want, what’s stopping a player from grinding with a class they’ve levelled up previously until right before they level up, then switching to a new class to level it up instead?

So I decided, character and classes with both require XP to level up, but they will level up individually. The player can determine the allocation percentage (per character) for XP from the menu, and when XP is earned, it will first be split per character (assuming there is always 4 characters in the group that is 25% per), and then per allocation percentage.

All of those words and all of that math basically add up to this.

If the party defeats 5 goblins in a battle, and each goblin is worth 40 XP, each character will receive 50 XP. Then, if a character has an allocation of 50/50, the class they have equipped will gain 25 XP and the character will be left with the remaining 25 XP. Whew. Only a little complicated.

I feel that even though it’s complicated, it adds a really unique strategy element to the game. Will I try to level up all of my classes so I have a wide range of abilities to use against the enemy, or will I try to level up my character so I gain more power overall and brute force my way through the game with basic abilities but great stats? Or, because the allocation percentage is on a per character basis, will I do both, having some characters be jack of all trades, and other characters reduced to BONK machine? Surely a philosophical question for the ages.

If you want to comment on anything, please go to the contact page! I monitor the email it goes to and I would love to hear from everyone if they like or don’t like the idea.

That’s a wrap for Dev Log #1. Be sure to check the site tomorrow for another Dev Log!