AtKM Progress Post 03

I know, I know. It's been a long time since I posted here. But, let's be honest... With all of the fast paced progress I had been making, it was only a matter of time before I burnt out and needed a month-long break. But I'm back and boy have I hit the ground running with my return.

In my story, I am just about to the part where the second character joins your party. Which meant that I needed to start looking into things like classes and different weapons / armors, etc. All of that fun stuff that makes a good RPG what it is. I wanted to keep my game fairly bare-bones, since it is meant to be a side piece to my fiction collection, so I decided on eight classes: one for each member of the party that you eventually meet / have. Not too bad, right? Yeah, except I forgot that mean ~80 different, completely unique weapons that would need sprites and stats and configuring and... Ugh.

Needless to say, I have spent the entire day working on numbers and figuring out which weapons would have faster stat growth in the offense and which would have better defensive stats or magic, or whatever, all the while trying to keep them relatively even and balanced so that there wasn't going to be an obvious "best team" to have out on the field.

And I don't know if this is a "to make things worse" situation or a "good on you for thinking ahead" moment, but rather than putting the numbers directly into the database [it was too hard to compare and change things there], I've used my tracking spreadsheet instead. Originally, this spreadsheet was to keep track of which music played when and which character sprites I'd already used for NPCs. Now there's tabs for... Well, let me just show you.

That's the Equipables tab. In full screen mode at 50% visibility. And you can't see the bottom. Like, not even close to seeing the bottom on either side. As you can see, that's a lot of work. A freaking lot. The good news is, this is well on its way to becoming part of my .pdf Player's Guide that will be available with the game. The bad news is... Now I have to transcribe all of those numbers [and more, since you can see how little I've done on the non-weapon section of the table] into the game's database and hope they come out alright.

I've been doing a bit of research and I've read that using small numbers isn't such a great idea for the stats, so we'll have to find that one out in beta, I guess. And if they're bad when they're small? I'll add a zero or something.  For now... I'm gonna go make some maps and get my mind off of crazy numbers for a little while.