Entry 6 - Fuck Math

No cute quips or clever titles today, it's just what it says on the tin.

This session was focused around balancing monsters around the party. I don't really want to waste time individually stat blocking every monster as the party goes through the different maps - this isn't going to be a long game so that'd be a lot of work for a short experience.

Instead I'm using Yanfly's Monster Levels plugin to have the monsters get automatically statted around the cast. Their base level is 30. With some adjustments, I've made it so that some enemies will be a few levels lower than the cast, and some a few levels higher. So far so good.

Because I've taken EXP out of the equation, the player will be able to defeat harder enemies by picking up gear which will apply stat bonuses. This is where the fuck math part comes in. If a new sword is too strong, it'll wipe out an enemy in one hit. If it's too weak, it'll take 100. This is a delicate balance to maintain.

I had to playtest an encounter over and over again until I found a scale that I was happy with - for now. I'm basically just going off of base ten. The starting sword in MV gives +10 to STR, for example. So at level 30, the starting sword should be +300. Then the next sword should be +320, +340, etc as players go through the game. This seemed to test alright, but I'll have to keep a very careful eye on everything as I continue the stat process.

But now that I've settled on a scale, I can now generate some monsters and monster abilities. Once I have those down from lowly skeleton to the final boss, I can design the equipment to match. And once that's done it's on to map-making.

I feel like I'm reaching the finish line, so I will probably start publishing these Dev Logs so that they can be viewed by people. One "nice-to-have" is to modify the UI so that it's not the bog standard RPG Maker MV shit, but I've imposed a hard deadline for myself and thus might not be able to do it. Or if I do, I'll probably grab assets off of Itch.io or something.

That's all for today.