Fractured Univese - Designing XP & Time / Level

While it may not be too terribly exciting, I thought I would at least do some form of documentation in terms of what I am doing game design wise for Fractured Universe. I do this as a means of hopefully starting conversations on methods, theories, general thoughts, and just all around game dev talk :). I am not saying the methods I am using are the best, so much as what I came up with and what seems to be practical and effective with the FU team. I am really just wanting to share this for developers (or anyone, really) who are curious about the methods and processes used and to start conversations. That said, I will start with what I just finished up- experience and leveling time.

After much deliberation on how to approach setting the required experience per level and the amount of time it takes per level, I decided on an approach.

The Approach
I wrote out initial values that I thought would be a good length of time between levels (varying from level to level, faster in the beginning and longer later on with some variations in shortness). From there, I wrote an equation that more or less matched the values I had written earlier. I put this equation into an excel spreadsheet applying it to every level and placing all the equations changeable variables into their own box. I'll explain the importance of this later on if you don't realize it outright.

XP Per Level
The next step was to figure out how much XP would be necessary per level. Since I had the amount of time it takes to level in minutes, I decided I would calculate the average expected XP / minute. This was easy as we already had a few mobs in game and I knew the XP they yielded. So after deciding about how many mobs a player should kill per minute, I was able to easily figure out the average xp, modifying it a bit of course. Additionally, the average XP /minute would also be increasing as the player gained in level. With this in mind, I wrote another equation to calculate the average XP and applied it to every level, again having all the variables in the formula modifiable.

With this I was at my final process, really, a simple one. I had my average XP / minute and the number of minutes per level. All that was left to do to figure out the amount of XP I needed per level was multiply the average xp / minute by the number of minutes per level and viola!


Now, the use of the spreadsheet and making all the variables changeable is a complete must. I wouldn't have it any other way. The reason is it allows me to tweak one element of any of the aforementioned formulas and all my values are automatically recalculated. I also have weights as to allow for various levels and brackets to be higher or lower. The benefit of this is that I can easily see what effect an increase in the avg xp / min will have on every level, the total estimated playing time, the amount of xp per level, and so forth. It also makes it nice for the coders ;)

One last thing I do after I've completed the first version of ths spreadsheet is upload it to Google's Docs & Spreadsheets. This allows for easy discussion & collaboration on the formulas, their results, easability for others to make quick tweaks, version control, etc. It is a very nice system, and thus far has been serving us well.

That's all for today. Nothing particularly revolutionary, but hope this was at least somewhat beneficial or interesting.