Last week’s achievements
* Preliminarily finalized dodge rate formula
* Sent art feedback for Jig (alternate outfit) round 2 and Lash round 2
Current focus
Balancing and testing enemies and enemy groups.
Weekly goals
* Send in art feedback for at least two out of Tango, Telia, and Kelly
* Send in face portrait requirements for at least three characters
* Add hit rates to all existing attacks
* Test a range of player party attacks against various early-game enemy groups and vice versa
Comments
Considering I got swept up in E3 hype for half the week and only had three and a half effective days (late Thursday to Sunday), I pulled off basically everything I intended to. Getting evasion correct proved more challenging than expected, though; I didn’t have my breakthrough until nearly midnight on Sunday. Testing nine characters or monsters against each other in various permutations, I aimed for a few key points:
* Celty, who has the game-best accuracy and game-best evasion, should almost always be able to hit a character who has exactly her stats
* Even characters or monsters with notably above average accuracy should have trouble hitting her even half the time
* Playable damage dealer characters, including fairly inaccurate ones, should always hit enemies except for the most extreme cases, who they should still hit more often than not
* Evasive playable characters should have dodge rates hovering around 25-40% against average enemies
* Level advantage should give a bonus to hit rate but not to dodge rate
* A certain early-game joke boss should almost never hit Celty but should hit “normal” evasive characters like Evelyn and Sakura around half the time
I went through a couple dozen iterations of increasingly intricate formulas, each missing the mark on at least one of these points, but found my solution when I decided to start from scratch, tossed out all the mounting complexity, and created a simpler formula. Now I only need to test a bit further to make sure it holds up at higher levels, then start running real in-game simulations with multiple-character parties and enemy parties.