Last week’s achievements

* Primarily damage formula testing
* Simplified energy attacks concept

Current focus

Battles!

Sample stuff

Pretty glorious.

Weekly goals

* Send in art feedback for everything
* Continue ironing out damage formula balance

Comments

Thought of the week:

The first step of any project is to grossly underestimate its complexity and difficulty.

— Nicoll Hunt (@nicollhunt) April 19, 2014

I’d extend it to not only projects, but components of projects. As I implemented moves in battles, one of the first steps was setting up damage formulas. No problem, thought I; I already know what my damage formulas are, so I only need to add them in.

Little fine-tuning here and there, but things were going great! I picked eleven reasonably diverse characters and matched them against their own stats to test. All the calculations seemed fine, so hey, cool! Just as a final check and to have a reference lying around in a spreadsheet, I’d match them against each other—

Uh-oh. This quickly revealed that energy attacks were too powerful. They’re meant to be powerful because they bypass defenses, not because they’re inherently four times better than physical or magical attacks. I had modeled my damage formulas after the Pokémon series because there’s no RPG I’m more familiar with, but I had gone overboard with my changes for energy attacks.

Days of testing later, you see the spreadsheet above! Even now I’m not confident that I’ve settled on a final formula, but it’s infinitely better off than before. Continuing to plug away!