I’m facing a tough design challenge… in my game I have a skill system. Each skill has a multiplier based on class. For now I didn’t put any skill cap – but in theory with the multiplier, each class should be different.

A healer would have x5 multiplier in White Magic. So, at level 9 (the max level for first episode) could get up to skill 50 (5 skill points per level if he practices it a lot). Also, every level up you can assign some skill points as you want. Assuming you create a human healer, you can assign 8 extra skill points (human gets most Skill Points of all races).

So in summary if you put all the points into white magic skill each levelup:

level 10 human healer, white magic skill = 50 (made with practice) + 8 sk * 10 = 130 skill points

Now this isn’t possible because I wanted to have skill maximum at 99 🙂 for sure I’ll have to raise this limit, but still having already a character at 130 skill after just level 10 is too much! Also, since the game is going to divided in 3 parts, and the first part has level cap 10 (so ideally, the 2nd part level 20, and the 3rd and last up to level 30) in the latter episodes you’d get an insanely high skill value:

level 30 human healer, white magic skill = 150 (made with practice) + 8 sk * 30 = 390 skill points!

For now I’m going to do this: half the number of skill points each race gets (so in the human case you can assign max 40 extra points for 10 level-ups) and also put a “per level skill cap”. This way the maximum value for any given skill for a level 10 character should be 50 + 4 sk x 10 = 90 skill points which is ok, and even for the 3rd episode would be:

level 30 human healer, white magic skill = 150 (made with practice) + 4 sk * 30 = 270 skill points

270 is still a lot for my original idea, but I don’t think player would like to see a very slow skill points increase over 30 levels… 🙂 also many MMORPG now have such high values for stats, I remember Everquest with values like 250 strength and so on!

Another problem I’m facing now is the spells system, based on Gods and prayers (prayer=spell).

Now each God has as different subset of spells. Each of them has minimum requirements of skills, for example:

Blessing Aura, White Magic = 3, level 1

the problem is that to add enough variety to the game, I need to add for each God at least 1 spell of any of the 6 magic schools (White, Black, Red, Yellow and Blue Magic), and I need to add a new one every 2-3 levels.

So only for the 1st God of humans (each race has 2 gods) I have already made 24 spells up to level 7, so probably will be 30 spells for each God! that means 30 x 6 Gods = 180 different spells !!

Hmm but well… I knew this game wouldn’t have been easy to program!!! 😀