HEDGE1'S PROFILE

If you're going to be making a lot of pictures of text, you should check out a utility I made. I haven't updated the instructions much so if you're confused on something, go ahead and ask. It makes the creation of a lot of single text images a lot easier, though.

http://rpgmaker.net/engines/custom/utilities/78/

If your computer yells at you when trying to open, it's safe. Your computer's just mad because it has access to write and overwrite your computer files.

author=Hasvers
The number of indie people who live off a single game is negligible, it doesn't work even for the big successes (like, say, being #1 on the App Store).

I totally agree that the number of people who live off a big success is very limited. But there's real revenue to be had in selling games. To the Moon sold nearly a million copies, for example, giving it revenue of about $2 million - $10 million. Since cracking $4 million gives you $40,000 guaranteed income for life (assuming 4% safe return with 3% inflation, so 1% real return -- actual stock market results are usually higher), a big success can and does give people that opportunity to pursue game making for a career...assuming they manage their windfall properly and don't just spend it all.

As for the example you cited, note that you're talking about a 99 cent app. Most of the money in apps is in ads, not sales. And most RPG games sell for more than 99 cents too. Additionally, the guy there was making $275,000 $155,000 in his regular full time job. So for him to say "game making was only marginally more profitable than my normal job" isn't really relatable.

That all said, even major game studios fail on a regular basis. Frankly, I'm willing to bet that games are among the most competitive industries on the planet. So any success there is a huge success. As Kentona said, he's not quitting his day job over this. I think that's wise.

EDIT: Totally did my math wrong on the guy's income. The more accurate number is probably $150,000-$160,000. Sorry for the mistake.

author=Crystalgate
Damage = (ATK ^ 2) / (DEF + ATK)will always result in damage going up when ATK goes up, unless you plug in negative numbers that is. Further, doubling ATK and DEF will always double the damage, tripling them will tripple the damage and so on. Unlike the (100 / (100 + DEF)) * ATK formula, (ATK ^ 2) / (DEF + ATK) will keep behaving.

To properly analyze the formula, lets take you "Hits" formula and rewrite it:

Hits = HP * (DEF + ATK) / ATK ^ 2
Hits = HP * ((DEF / ATK ^ 2) + (ATK / ATK ^ 2))
Hits = HP * ((DEF / ATK ^ 2) + (1 / ATK))
Hits = HP * DEF / ATK ^ 2 + HP / ATK

Rewritten like this, ATK only appears as a divisor and now suddenly durability no longer appears to increase as ATK increases. This has always been the case. You need to be careful when the same variable appears as both dividend and divisor.

I re-read your post like three times thinking I made another snafu, but I'm actually alright, fortunately, though still in a position where I'm agreeing with you that I should recant my earlier statement.

So here's where I'm OK: I wasn't saying that increasing ATK with the formula wouldn't increase damage. I always knew more ATK was a good thing.

Here's where I'm wrong: I was saying that ATK was impacting the formula in ways that weren't beneficial.

I would have responded sooner to your statement but it actually took a bit of time to figure out exactly why I had included the extra +ATK initially (go me for not taking notes on the topic). On the surface it looks like a big mistake, since it garbles the numbers and eliminates the ability to make player-sensical number scaling.

On the flip side, however, it prevents ATK from scaling out of control if a power-leveled character hits an early game target. Without the extra +ATK, a mere 548 ATK could deal 30,000 damage to a 10 DEF target. I don't mind easily killing a 10 DEF target. But I do mind how awkward it feels for 548 ATK to do 30,000 damage, especially when it's generally doing around 550 damage. Furthermore, by raising DEF from 10 to 50, damage falls to just 6,000. Again, that feels really awkward (even though on a hits-to-kill basis it makes perfect sense).

So to prevent the awkwardness, I included the extra +ATK. Now your 548 ATK does 1076 damage instead of 30,000. Not as much fun, but much more expected. It also helps prevent an unexpectedly powerful foe from doing a random party wipe.

On final thing to say is that I appreciate your rejiggering of the formula. It's really nice how you can present a point through the way the mathematical formula is presented.

author=Irog
@ hedge1

Sorry for confusing you. I forgot to mention the Action Point system of my game.

Each unit has Action Points and consumes some to move and attack. Units don't have attack or defense stat but differ in HP, Action Point cost per move, and weapon range. Depending on how well the player moves, the unit can deliver 1 to 3 attacks in a round.

I want the player to focus on strategy and moves so I'm thinking to make the damage system as simple as possible. And I wonder how much I should simplify the damage computation formula.

My favorite game of all time is Shining Force II, and one of the reasons is because it is a game heavily focused on map placement of your characters, not on their raw power or general ability usage. It ends up being a simple formula that's easy to learn and difficult to master. And it prevents you from ever having Orlandu just running around winning the battle for you solo.

So in that regard, I endorse your game design, and I think it could work. Three comments though.

First, if you're going to have multiple attacks in a round, ensure they're fast and don't waste time. I'd say even the sword slashes from FFT would be too long. Look for animations of 1-2 seconds or less.

Second, make sure that the optimal strategy isn't always to move as little as possible to maximize damage. Since 3 attacks is literally 300% damage versus one, it's easy to just sit back and wait for the enemy to move towards you and do one damage, while you counter for three damage next turn.

Third, a good rule to follow is the simpler your game, the shorter it should be. So you're probably not looking at a long game. That's probably for the best though, since it gives you a greater chance to finish it and, if it's popular, gives you a reason to make a sequel.

author=Feldschlacht IV
Question! How do I utilize some of these formulas for my game (ACE)?

Like, if I wanted to use ATK / (DEF / ATK + 1) , where would I put it, and how would I adjust it for skills?

I'd suggest using 2 * ATK / (DEF / ATK + 1) instead. This way, if ATK = DEF, you'll do damage = ATK. Otherwise, damage will be half of your ATK. Up to you though.

Warning, lots of math ahead!

author=Irog
What matters with damage in general is how many hits the target can take. So the damage formula needs to be examined in parallel with HP.

For example, based on the reasoning on the standard formula, Damage = (100 / (100 + def)) * atk leads to

Hits = HP / Damage = HP * (100 + def) / (100 * atk)

so raising def by 1 is equivalent to raising HP by 1%. Thus, we could replace the damage computation formula by Damage = atk and have the armor giving extra % of HP instead of defense points.

You know, one cool thing about this topic is that it's forcing me to really think about how the math works rather than just churn the formulas through a bunch of possibilities in a spreadsheet and evaluate them that way (as I did originally).

I hadn't previously considered HP as part of the equation, but doing so makes it a lot easier to showcase the deficiencies of the formula you listed. So that's pretty awesome. Let's start again with your basic formula:

Hits = HP * (100 + DEF) / (100 * ATK)

What's actually happening here is that there are two scaling values in the numerator that determines durability (HP and DEF), but only one in the denominator to determine damage (ATK). Basically, in an extremely simplified sense, the formula is in the following form:

Hits = Durability ^ 2 / Damage

From that it's easy to see why the formula gets out of control at higher numbers. Eventually the squaring effect on the durability side completely overwhelms the damage side. For example, if Durability = 500, we'd need 250,000 Damage for the formula to balance. That's obviously ridiculous. One way to bring it back to equilibrium would be the following:

Hits = Durability ^ 2 / Damage ^ 2

After the revision, both sides scale equally effectively. Now consider the formula I recommended earlier:

Damage = (ATK ^ 2) / (DEF + ATK)

Hits = HP * (DEF + ATK) / ATK ^ 2

Because I'm squaring ATK, I'm compensating for the fact that HP and DEF are multiplied in the numerator, which in turn allows the formula to scale to any amount without getting out of control. However, the observant among you might notice I have an extra + ATK in numerator, which (if we follow the prior formula) should be for "durability," not damage. What's up?

What's up is that I made a mistake. But it wasn't very apparent in my testing because additive values tend to get hidden by the size of the multiplicative values. This "hiding" effect is actually one of the reasons the original (100 / (100 + DEF)) * ATK formula appears to behave properly when in fact it doesn't. To illustrate, let's rewrite the original formula again, but this time put Hits and ATK on the same side of the equation.

Hits * (100 * ATK) = HP * (100 + DEF)

Next let's eliminate the muddying 100 values so we can more clearly see what's going on with the variables:

Hits * ATK = HP * DEF

We can now see clearly that if Hits is held constant, we're more or less saying that ATK = HP * DEF. Eww. As I previously suggested, one solution to this is to hold DEF constant. And now we see why this works. Or we could hold HP constant instead, which may sound odd, but anyone familiar with Warsong knows it's been done before.

Another option games have employed is to add an additional multiplier for ATK rather than hold constant either HP or DEF. If we use the constant 100 for this ATK multiplier, the new formula becomes:

Hits * ATK * 100 = HP * DEF

This is only a temporary solution, however, since once HP or DEF far exceed 100 the formula falls apart. It also doesn't work with small values. If HP = 100, DEF = 10, and Hits = 10, then ATK = 1. That's unacceptable. So the formula gets patched again with an extra +100 to DEF.

Hits * ATK * 100 = HP * (DEF + 100)

As I hope you're noticing, we're not actually solving anything at this point. Instead we're just adding in numbers to cover up the problem and hope that people won't notice. It seems to work with certain numbers (namely those we're testing), but the fundamental design of the formula is off. I feel we can do better.

I started looking at how various other games handled this. Diablo 3 appears to have dropped DEF altogether. WoW and Skyrim both simply cap your DEF (technically they cap "damage reduction," but that's essentially what DEF is in this case). And then there's League of Legends.

League of Legends is a mess when it comes to calculations, and I'm not going to go into all the weird junk they pull to try to force things to add up properly. Instead, I'm just going to mention something clever they do to solve the above issue: add multiplicative effects to ATK. Namely they include both Attack Speed and Critical Strike, making their formula:

Hits * (ATK * Attack Speed * Critical Strike Chance) * 100 = HP * (DEF + 100)

Now the astute among you may see that we still have an unbalanced formula, since there are three multiplier effects on the left (ATK, Attack Speed, Crit Chance) and only two on the right (HP and DEF). League of Legends "corrects" this by capping both Attack Speed and Critical Strike at 2.5 each, but I wouldn't really say that's a sound correction. But it is another take on how one might create logical scaling on both sides of the formula. For example, simply eliminate Crit Chance and we have something that looks perfectly reasonable:

Hits * ATK * Attack Speed = HP * DEF

So I hope that clears things up for some people, and maybe opens up some new possibilities for what formulas you can use for your game. I, for one, am pretty excited about all of this and will be making adjustments. To what I'm not entirely sure, but now that I have a better understanding of the math behind it all it should be easier to avoid dumb things like make one's durability scale off of the enemy's ATK.

author=Irog
In the development of MinST, I started with constant damage formula, thinking of enhancing it later with attack and defense dependencies. But it didn't happen due to the limitations of console display. I'm now thinking to push the simplicity even further : have all attacks causing 1 damage so HP become a direct measure of how many hits the unit can take. What do thing about it?

I'm a bit confused here. If all attacks do exactly one damage, what's the purpose of having different weapons, spells, abilities, or even attack stat? You could give players multiple attacks per round, but isn't that the same thing as saying they're just doing multiple damage?

author=Marrend
How is atk/(def/atk+1) equivalent to atk^2/(atk+def)? Like, if you plug in an atk of 5 and a def of 7, the first formula would (essentially) return 30/7 whereas the second returns 25/12 ?

My formulas are correct. You just need to remember the order of operations. So the first formula, using 5 and 7, becomes 5/(7/5+1). It's not 7/(5+1) on the bottom, but rather (7/5)+1, which is the same as (7/5)+(5/5), or 12/5. Thus it's 5/(12/5) or 25/12, which is the same as the 2nd formula.

author=Jude
The issue isn't that defense varies, it's that you scaled HP up way too high at 5000.... To determine your HP scaling you reverse-engineer the formula, starting with how many hits you want an average character to take before they are knocked out.... If a character at level 1 starts with 10 attack and defense and you want them to survive ten hits, then they have about 300 HP. A level 50 character with 100 attack and defense has 800 HP. The numbers you choose are equally important to the formula you're using.

The bolded part is exactly what I am trying to avoid. Unfortunately, having a formula like yours absolutely requires you to do the math. Consider the following example:

Using your formula, 20 ATK, 20 DEF, and 1000 HP takes 22.5 hits to kill.
400 ATK, 400 DEF requires around 2120 HP to retain 22.5 hits to kill.
4000 ATK, 4000 DEF requires only around 2240 HP to retain 22.5 hits to kill.

And no, that's not a typo. If ATK and DEF are increased by 3600, HP needs to increase only 120. That's nonsensical to the average person. It doesn't, by the way, get better if you make DEF proportionately smaller than ATK. The same scaling issue persists.

Now, as you said, you can reverse-engineer every number. But why take that time if you don't have to?

author=hedge1
The larger the numbers the more out of control this gets. The scaling doesn't make intuitive sense.

I said this for a reason. When you're dealing with a nice narrow range of numbers your formula works well. But if you're going to have large variations in stats, like from 400 to 4000, then you'll run into problems.

Just so I'm clear here, I'm not saying my formula is without problems. For example, if you double ATK using my formula you more than double damage. That means spell power is not intuitively comparable. Depending on the game this could be disastrous. But I'm dealing with JRPGs where such scaling is actually the norm, so I consider this drawback acceptable given the advantages elsewhere.

It's also worth noting that your formula, ATK * (100 / (25 + DEF)) is of the form ATK * (X / (Y + DEF)), with X = 100 and Y = 25. My formula simply takes X = ATK and Y = ATK. I could choose, if I wanted, X = LV of attacker, and Y = LV of defender. Whatever one picks for X and Y, though, really can influence what you can do (or can't do) with the numbers. And if your game is going to deal with a wide range of values, X and Y need to scale with them or else you get weird outcomes like the HP example I showed above.