Hello, my question is different from the usual character creation threads in the I’m looking for advice and a direction of further reading on the backend to the characters we create. I was hoping for help on the stats and calculating of attack damage etc. what are the best ways of calculating it all and of course methods of scaling.
I’m not looking for some one to give me a ready made system as such but more places to go for me to learn more about it so I can develop a systems that feels right for my game. There seems to be lots of places for the creation of the physical creation of the 3d model but no where really (that I can find anyway) that talks about the logic, the brain and soul of the characters.
Thank you very much, any links or personal anecdotes would be greatly appreciated
You should check the documentation on data driven gameplay (where you could setup excel sheets to use for stats, etc.) and that should help you with scaling, perhaps. You should also do some research into combat system balancing (I mention due to your note about calculating attack damage) in order to get some great info from other systems designers along those lines. One note I’d make is that balancing is extremely important, so you should spend a good bit of time on it. (If it suits your design, of course. You didn’t mention any particular style you’re going for or anything.) In a first-person shooter you wouldn’t want to make 20 weapons and have one so good that no one uses the other 19. Creating characters for players to choose between in perhaps an RPG style game can run into a similar issue, if one character is so powerful there’s no reason to play any others (or the others aren’t fun or interesting in some other gameplay-related way) then you’re wasting your time creating all those extra characters.
On calculating the attack damage specifically in a general way; One method I’ve used is to have a character with a base damage, then add/multiply/etc any modifiers from equipment, abilities or the like before applying it to a given attack. Base damage typically being modified by level (or character-specific advantages of some sort like racial stat benefits in some MMO games) and just adding up all the modifiers to apply to the calculation in a simple fashion.
On stats specifically; If you’re talking about perhaps things like an “endurance”, “intelligence”, “stamina” sort of stat generation for characters, sometimes it helps to get an idea of how many stats you want and then creating a number of different characters that will have strengths in a single stat area (or a combination of stat areas) in order to take advantage of them all. It wouldn’t make much sense to have 4 key stats and then only create two characters, each of them only using 1 key stat as a unique strength. It’d make more sense to make four characters with each having a different stat being their special attribute instead.
Which brings me back to the idea of system balancing noted in the beginning. There are a lot of great interviews with systems designers out there on YouTube and other sites. It’s a great subject to research. Here’s a link to an interview with the Lead Systems Designer (Isaiah Cartwright) on Guild Wars 2 that I found pretty interesting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_uvbNKll-Vc