How do you Design a levelling system and a DPS system?

[ODSTsteels]

Hey
I am currently writing a GDD to be reviewed but to finish it i need to create a Levelling system and a DPS system from the game but i dont even know where to start so can someone tell me how to create a levelling and DPS system?
Any help you can provide is extremely appreciated.

[qubodup]

Post your gdd so far and hopefully we'll be able to help.

(lol. this is just like a "need help at coding!" - "post code" discussion! )

[Sindwiller]

Yeah, we're of no help if we don't know what your concept is like.

[charlie]

This is spam. Next post will be about WoW.

If it wasn't spam, why would it get posted in Showcase rather than Game Design?

[MCMic]

What are GDD, Levelling and DPS?

[oln]

GDD - Game Design Document - basically a large plan for everything about the game
Levelling - the process of gaining levels in an RPG or similar.
DPS - Damage per second?

[richardjames13]

Fibonacci sequence can be used for determining player level according to XP.

DPS (Damage Per Second) implies that the combat is real time.

DPS can be used to describe the damage certain weapons and powers have over time. Or the multi class system of Tank, Healer, Controller, DPS commonly found in a MMO.

[MCMic]

Thank you both for the explanations!

[qubodup]

If it wasn't spam, why would it get posted in Showcase rather than Game Design?

My guess is language barriers

Same username at http://uk.answers.yahoo.com/question/in ... 335AAj4QJy plus question being asked within same timeframe and google not showing any results besides this thread and the yahoo questions page. All this indicates that this might be not spam. I was skeptic at first too though.

I mailed the author asking for taking a look at the thread.

[richardjames13]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fibonacci_number
Fibonacci sequence is like
1 1 2 3 5 8 13 21
This maps onto the experience needed to gain a level
I.e.
Level, Fibonacci, Exp Needed To Gain Level
1 1 1000
2 1 1000
3 2 2000
4 3 3000

Where the exp needed to gain each level is 1000 * the Fibonacci number

This leads to exp per level ranges of
Level, Exp Range, Fibonacci, Exp needed to reach next level
0 0-999 1 1000
1 1000-1999 1 1000
2 2000-3999 2 2000
3 4000-6999 3 3000
4 7000-11999 5 5000

Etc all calculated from the Fibonacci sequence

You should really place all these values into a spreadsheet. That way you can see what experience is needed for what level. Then you can calculate the required (tasks) the player has to accomplish to get that experience versus the skills granted by the level. Assuming that you use that sort of levelling system.

For instance say there is an early boss that requires a level 3 character to beat. Before the player beats that boss they need 4000exp gained. If exp is gained via quests then their needs to be at least 4000exp in quest rewards before that boss. If the exp is gained via tasks like killing monsters then you need to calculate how many monsters the player kills to get 4000exp. Mixed systems give different results again.

If these values are calculated in the GDD then they may not need to be altered as the game is written. Of course getting the right balance is hard.

[hc]

I'd recommend to have a look at progressive, proportional and degressive cost functions.
Fibonacci is just one progressive function out of many, and it isn't tuneable - instead you have to tune the world (monsters, quests).
This is not bad, makes the task less complex for a single character game, but gives you no control over individual character's leveling of a group of characters. This is especially necessary if low level party members join late and need to catch up. Or for different archtypes. Say a wizzard is weak for a long time but then as he gets wiser his powers increase dramatically. Or a babarian can build muscles fast at an early age but then it gets harder to become stronger.

X^Y [ pow(X,Y) ] is a function you can tune to be progressive (Y > 1), proportional (Y=1) and degressive (0 < Y < 1) to any degree.
And if X is in the range of 0.0 and 1.0 only, then you get curves in the range of 0.0 and 1.0, too.

So how can you use this with experience points and leveling?
Say Level 100 is your limit, then:

your_level = 100.0 * (your_exp^Y)
min_exp_needed_for_level = (level/100.0)^(1.0/Y)

Of course you need to adjust your_exp to be in the [0.0, 1.0] range. too. The second formula should be the inverse of the first. I hope these are right.

Isn't this a little bit too complicated?
The (dis-)advantage is that all characters would reach level 100 at the same amount of experience points but take a different course - so in between different characters have different leveling advantages at different phases in their life. In case you want to quickly adjust leveling for individual characters you may prefer more easy tuneable functions. So changing Y can provide you characters that level up more quickly when lower level, and characters that level up more quickly when having a higher level (relative to others) but have a slower start leveling. For actual tuning I would start with a default value to adjust the world and then you may make characters to use varied values.

Has this been used before?
RPG-Maker XP had similar adjustable experience curves and AFAIK popular JRPGs use different experience curves - as for X^Y, I don't know what exact functions they used.