This is going to be a complicated video.
If you're not specifically interested in RPGs and the problems you'll face when making them
and how I chose to overcome them, you're going to have a bad time.
Save yourself the hassle and go elsewhere!
However, if you are intrigued, this could save you hundreds of hours should you ever
make one yourself.
The game that my friend and I made, Santasatnas, was a broken mess.
In the original release, although the world map and battle screens had been tested, they
hadn't been tested together so it lead to small problems like THE GAME BEING IMPOSSIBLE
TO COMPLETE.
It's now had a massive overhaul.
And I mean it.
Although the graphics, menus and storyline are identical, the game's completely different.
Sort of like a nice guy in Hitler's body.
Both versions are available for download in the description of this video.
Try each of them out for just 5 minutes and see how much of a difference this makes!
If you're making a game, take note.
What I'm talking about here is how the game feels, from something as small as having the
right button perform an action, to being as big as justifying 20 minutes of grinding for
a new, expensive spell.
Although this level of polish and playtesting is taken for granted, games without it are
horrible to play.
Before I did anything to it, I played through the game in its original state.
I didn't even bother making notes at this point.
I wanted to get a feel for what worked, what didn't and ultimately what impression the
game left.
Surprisingly, although the beginning of Santasatnas was too hard and confusing and the ending
too easy, the middle part was really fun.
I found myself stranded on a snowy island where I could fight 1 of 2 different enemy
types.
One was hard, the other...
impossible!
I ended up having to slowly grind against the easier one, retreating quickly if I encountered
the other sort.
Bad game design?
Perhaps.
But I enjoyed it.
All of a sudden, it was testing what I had learned!
My characters were making the transition from noobs to end-boss beaters, and this was the
challenge they needed!
This was one of the things that I wanted to build upon.
Firstly, the game's controls were horrible.
You used the arrows to move about, shift to do some things, ctrl for others and enter
for the rest.
To equip items in your second slot you had to hold shift whilst clicking.
It's okay for me; I know the game.
But for anybody else?
IMPOSSIBLE!
Now, WASD does the same as the arrow keys.
Nobody will notice in-game since they'll start with their preference and stick with it.
Next, I reduced all commands down to the same key.
The go-to button, spacebar.
Oh and escape to open the menu.
Before, you had to click on items to highlight them and double-click to buy, but I shifted
this so they highlight when your mouse cursor is over them and are bought on a single click.
Brilliant!
Although I was used to the game's controls, this immediately felt better and made it more
fun to play.
Next I moved to the battles.
In the original game, there was no balance.
The spells, ranged weapons and melee all worked at level 1, but as your character grew more
powerful, melee became overpowered.
Ranged attacks did less and had no advantages, whereas magic did good damage but quickly
used up MP which needed to be replenished.
If you want to make an RPG, you had better like spreadsheets.
Because that's what I needed to do.
I began typing up all of the weapons, magic spells and stats.
Not for the fun of it, but in an attempt to balance the game.
The goal was to make different playstyles equally viable but uniquely different.
It came together nicely.
Melee wouldn't just make you better with swords, but would also increase your maximum health.
Ranged attacks do less damage but speed up how often you can do them.
And levelling up white and black magic will make the spells more potent and also increase
the rate at which MP regenerates.
That was my goal.
And if you think it's simple, you're not seeing the bigger picture.
But if you think it's impossible, you don't have nearly as much faith in the power of
playtesting as you should do!
The secret is to reduce the variables down to the bare minimum.
You don't want to be trying to balance 1000 different variables at once.
You need to focus on two, get those to balance and then slowly introduce more, relying on
extensive playtesting to keep things reasonably fair.
I started a new game of Santasatnas, making one player fully melee and the other fully
ranged, balancing the effectiveness of ranged and melee throughout the course of the game.
The original game made melee weapons better than ranged in three different ways; the level
multiplier was higher, the melee attack was stronger and the base damage of melee weapons
was greater.
These combined meant that it inflicted massive amounts of damage within about 10 minutes
of gameplay.
I could have been there for months balancing these elements but instead made ranged completely
identical to melee.
Easy!
The only difference now was balancing the amount of health gained from melee players
against the increased speed of attacks that ranged players would have.
Being a ranged character still gives you more HP per level than a magic character does,
so the difference in health didn't matter too much.
However, by the end of the game, ranged characters could be 25% faster than melee, giving them
the advantage by having more turns to attack or to heal with.
Great, so the game starts balanced but melee becomes increasingly underpowered as it progresses.
I could have balanced this in a number of ways but wanted to do it in a way that didn't
upset the other mechanics.
My solution?
Each shop area you encounter in Santasatnas sells more powerful items than the last.
All I have to do is to ensure that they sell melee weapons that are more powerful than
their ranged counterparts!
I found this easier to fine-tune than level or skill multipliers, which would have altered
the balance across the entire game.
There you have it, people- more powerful weapons aren't just there to reward you, they're for
sneakily balancing the characters with other class types.
Once I was happy that ranged and melee characters were equally viable, I played through again
with black magic and melee.
The idea of balancing damage based on character level, ability, amount of MP, rate of restoration,
enemy difficulty and weaknesses and so on TERRIFIED me.
But in practice, it was very simple.
Ranged and melee are based on 3 elements; your level, skill in that area and the base
damage of the weapon.
But black magic doesn't have this third multiplier.
This means that it will become comparatively weaker as the game advances.
So to compensate, I upped the multiple in other areas, gave each enemy type a specific
strength and weakness to reward playtesters who bothered to grind and to grow familiar
with particular enemies, and introduced a more powerful version of each of the 3 main
black magic attacks later on in the game to give back the damage advantage that black
magic users had early on, which is once again offset by how much MP it drains.
It also makes them have to pay for a better spell, much like how melee and ranged have
to invest in better equipment.
I properly tested melee, ranged and black magic.
But white magic is different.
It doesn't help you to beat the enemy, only to save yourself.
Plus, even without specialising in it, you can still heal enough damage to protect you
from a single attack.
I made the perks of levelling up white magic that you'd heal more damage, but would eventually
access spells that let you heal your partner at the same time, making your white magic
guy a dedicated healer.
I loved random damage when I first made Santasatnas.
Most of the attacks were one third based on your stats and two thirds random.
I removed this since I'd like there to be a more direct link between being a higher
level and consistently inflicting more and more consistent amounts of damage.
Even melee and ranged characters, the simplest types in the game, end up unlocking different
attack types later on; with melee, normal attack inflicts good but consistent damage.
'Thrust' is more randomised but is ultimately worth it since the average is higher than
normal.
And the last was 'sever' which deals smaller amounts of damage but repeatedly does so,
once again doing more than the standard attack in total which should hopefully balance it
against the immediately satisfying standard 'slash' attack.
It also keeps all 3 attack types relevant as the game progresses.
I did the same with ranged, though the second 'wound' attack does less damage but slows
the enemy down, kind of like a less powerful version of the 'slow' spell.
In the original game these attacks weren't balanced, but now, all character classes should
have plenty of different options to choose from, which should give the game considerably
more depth.
Would you rather deal big damage than nitty gritty things like 'poison', 'confuse' and
'slow'?
If so, you're like me.
And this game perhaps reflects my biases since I made these less common attacks super effective
in an attempt to compensate.
Casting 'Slow' at the beginning of a fight practically halves the amount of attacks the
enemy will inflict, and 'protect' will improve your armour and give you regen.
By making them more useful than a standard attack I'm hoping that players will experiment
with these spells rather than only use the default attack command, which is both boring
and more difficult to win with.
I did the majority of the testing in the excel sheet, where it's very quick and easy to change
character builds and to try out different attacks.
It would probably have taken me 20 times longer had I loaded the game up and tried to balance
it that way.
A master Excel sheet with all of the game's levelling and damage formulas is necessary
if you're making an RPG.
I hate armour in games.
It's never clear just how much of an impact it has.
It becomes a necessity, but not a rewarding one.
In the original game it would protect you from a % of damage inflicted.
But that makes the armour early on in the game not worth buying and the stuff at the
end massively overpowered.
I'm super proud of what I changed it to.
In each area you'll find several new armour types.
The cheapest will protect you from 40% of damage, the best, 60%.
This means that even the worst in a zone will protect you from a decent amount of damage!
But I added another variable- the more expensive the armour, the higher the maximum amount
of damage it will protect you from.
So cheap armour might do you in your particular area, but the expensive stuff will absorb
a slightly higher % and will also stop attacks from creatures in the NEXT area, which you'll
have to cross through before reaching the next shops!
Suddenly, all armour has a purpose.
I also show in battle how much damage is inflicted and how much is absorbed by the armour so
the players have a visual guide to how much their armour helps.
I went through the entire game with different character classes and combinations of upgrades.
Compared with the original game, I made it easier to level up since I enjoyed being rewarded
for grinding and more level-ups gave me more opportunities to customise my character into
the character class I wanted.
One of the hardest things was balancing how much money and XP you would get from each
enemy.
I wanted 2 enemies in each area, one who rewarded more XP and another for more money, but opted
for simple 'harder enemies give you more XP and MONEY' and made it scale with how much
more expensive the later equipment was.
And there you have it.
I had fixed the game's core problems.
To me, the transformation was complete.
But the proof is in the playtesting so I invited my top friends to test
it out.
What happened next may shock you!
Find out next video.