Games Programmer
Honours Project
The main focus of 4th year, the project and module where most 4th year students put most of their time and effort into has always been the honours project. Since the start 4th year, I was very excited at what I could do for it. And for when deciding what to do for it, I felt that most important of all, the project had to be something of interest to me. Since I liked Role Playing Games (RPG) and was probably going to make one sometime in the future, I decided that that would be the best place to start.
The question that I posed in my honours project was:
"Exploring experience distribution, what successful method among those explored can be used to distribute experience among all the enemy types in a Role Playing Game to balance levelling?"
Simply put, I explored ways to make game designer's life easier by alleviating one of their jobs, since in my opinion, it is their job to ensure that the player is not overlevelled or underlevelled when progressing normally in an RPG. By exploring various algorithms and trying to create a formula to help calculate the amount of experience each monster should need, (after taking into account various criteria such as maximum level, minimum level, level thresholds, etc), the player should then always be at the level threshold for areas assuming they defeat all enemies that are encountered. The resulting tool created from testing the various algorithms is shown below (though since the tool was designed specifically for an RPG with random encounters through a random number of walked steps, and as such the tool would not work for RPGs that don't have some of the following criteria).
The Base Tool Without Any Values
The filled in criteria are the values specific to the game created to test the tool. (Other games that atleast have each of the criteria would have different values). Upon confirming that the values are entered, the tool will output the experience values for the number of monsters specified for your random encounters, as shown below.
The Base Tool With the Values for the RPG
The experience values could then be tested by playing the RPG and defeating the final boss. If the player can get through the game without needing to run around to intentionally encounter additional enemies, and is at the proper level thresholds at the end of each area, the tool can be concluded that it works. (plotting graphs using data from playtesters helped support this).
However, there is one thing I would nitpick at looking back at the project (aside from finding bugs in the game and in the tool interface now that I look at it again). Since the algorithm and criteria could only be tested using the one game, it could not be tested to see if it worked with another similarly designed RPG. I have confidence that provided the criteria is the same for the RPGs, the tool will calculate and distribute the values properly. But as it stands, since I have not yet made another RPG, hence I could not say for sure.
You can download and try the tool and RPG by clicking on the button to the right!
And if you would like to read my honours project, email me, and I will provide you with a link to download it!
