Numeric Relations in Games

In this blog post I will be discussing the game ‘Final Fantasy 13’, and discuss the relationships between the numbers in that game.

Let’s start the discussion by looking at the big picture. Final Fantasy 13 is a game with progression mechanics. Players kill monsters in the game world. These monsters drop items that can be sold for gold (or they can try to find gold in treasure chests). Players also gain ‘crystogen points (CP)’, which are similar to experience points in other games. These CP’s allow the player to upgrade their character by spending points to gain benefits such as stronger attacks, more health, new abilities, etc. On top of these resources, the player also gains technical points (TP), which are spent in battles and allows the player to use special spells. The simplest explanation for using TP points is as follows: the more TP points a player has accumulated before going into battle, the more choices they have when it comes to using spells. For example, with a full TP gauge, the player could choose to use 1 very powerful spell that depletes all or nearly all of the points, or they may choose to multiple weaker spells, which deplete less TP.

Final Fantasy 13 was a fun game overall; however, there are parts of the game that I did find frustrating. I’ve only played through the entire game once, which was a few years ago, but there was one main point about the game that had me frustrated that I still remember, which was the grinding that was required. Although the game did not specifically tell you to “go grinding”, you, the player would know you had to grind in order to progress. If you were unfortunate like me, you didn’t make all the best choices when it came to upgrading and suffered the consequences. This happens around 75% - 80% into the game’s storyline, and trying to progress is fairly difficult due to the sudden spike in enemy difficulty. With no other choice, players will be forced to grind in order to get enough CP to level up their characters to a reasonable level so that they stand a chance against the enemies in the next section. Although the area seems “huge”, if you were like me and spent several DAYS grinding enemies, that map eventually becomes small and boring. It is at this point that putting the game down is something that is not hard to do.

Let’s talk about the resources and their numerical relationships. Below, I have drawn a picture of the resources in the game and how they relate to each other.

My definition for resource comes from the book ‘Fundamentals of Game Design’, written by Ernest Adams, founder of the IGDA. This is the definition in the book:

Resources: Entities in the game world that may be created, destroyed, gained, lost, transferred from place to place or from player to player, or converted into other entities. Resources must be measured in numeric quantities. If an entity in a game never changes and cannot be traded, such as a hill in a war game, then the entity is not a resource.

Now that we’ve seen how the resources are related to each other, here are some of their relationships:

Gil and Potion: 50 Gil will buy you 1 potion, which gives 150 HP, a general case of the identity relationship and is linear. (50 to 150 linear relationship)

CP and ‘Level’: The more CP a player has, the more they can level up. Increasing CP-to-level relationship used so that more and more CP is required to gain a level, and also the game is too slow in the beginning for the player to try to camp and only kill weaker enemies.

Cie’th Stone Missions and Rewards: The player only gets the set reward for the first time they complete the mission. Afterwards the rewards continue to go down in value. There is a decreasing value relationship between the two.

Time and HP: These two resources also have a decreasing relationship. The longer a player stands around thinking or doing nothing in a battle, the more opportunities an enemy has to attack the player and decrease their HP. 

Enemies and Drops: The relationship between the two could be described as linear. Rare drops, or items that are worth a lot of Gil if sold, are only dropped by bosses or enemies with huge amounts of HP and take a while to defeat (even then there is only a random chance the player may get a rare item). Lower level or common enemies only drop items that are worth little Gil.

There are definitely more relationships between resources in the game, however, to keep this post from getting too long I think the ones above demonstrate some of the key relationships in this game.

To conclude, my suggestions for improving this game would be to increase the amount of CP received in the mid game. This will allow players to level up a bit more and hopefully they won’t run into the same problem I did: under leveled characters vs. over powered enemies. Another suggestion would be to decrease the health on some of the bosses. The bosses are usually over powered and while I agree that it is important to have some challenges in the game to keep the game fun, I think the designers went a bit far with the numbers for the bosses and should tweak them a bit to improve it. My final suggestion is to change the relationship between the Cie’th Stone missions and rewards. Although the value of the rewards decreases, there is still a level of randomness to the rewards and therefore sometimes the value of a reward may be higher than that of the previous (although it generally goes down). I think it should be a strictly decreasing relationship so that players cannot spam the missions to get more and more Gil or items for easy work.

Rules vs Mechanics

In Raph's blog, he mentions that games have 3 types of games, constituative, operational, and implicit. 

Some of the arguments he makes in his blog post are:
- core precept are made out of games
- game grammer focuses on constituative rules
-"falling and dying" are seen as feedback from the game


Ralph discusses the differences between rules and mechanics and how they fit into the MDA model. I agree with his points about how rules and mechanics are not the same. Mechanics are built in functions that make up the game, while rules are there for restraining the player on what he can or can do.

GDW Update - 1

Time for a long overdue update on how I'm doing this semester for the game. I've switched from programming to working on art, modeling, design, and business stuff for the game this semester. I will also most likely be programming some of the raknet stuff for the game later on in the semester.

To try to help the group get off to a better start this year/semester, what I am doing now is doing a placeholder level. The other artist and I have been working hard to get some placeholder objects/levels in place so that the programmers will have something to work with while we model the actual stuff during the semester. This way, hopefully there will be no complaints and when the models are completed they can be smoothly and easily incorporated into the game with no trouble. Below are some pictures of what the placeholder level looks like right now:

Here is a screenshot of the level from perspective view

The same level from top view

A lot of the stuff isn't 100% finalized yet so they can still change. This should, however, be enough for the programmers to work with for now until the game is more planned out during this next week.

Some of the stuff that have been planned out:
Characters: We have planned 4 characters/classes: Assault, Sniper, Medic, and Engineer. To provide a rough idea, the assault character will be the most well balanced of the 4, the sniper will have high damage and accuracy but is slow, the medic is able to heal allies, and the engineer is able to place turrets that will fire at the enemy automatically.

Gameplay: The game will basically be similar to a 'horde mode' game, where hordes of enemies will come at the players until they die. There will endless waves of enemies, hence the game name 'Endless'.

Multiplayer: As part of the assignment, the game will allow for multiple players to play over a network. A maximum of 4 players is allowed with AI controlling the other un-chosen characters. There will also be a public and private chat option.

Obstacles: The obstacles will be destroyable. Depending on what the object is, it will have a set amount of HP and once there has been enough damage (whether from player or enemy), it will be destroyed and nobody will be able to hide in that area without being shot at.

Story: Basically, the year is 2050 and the game takes place on planet Earth. An evil corporation sees the human race as nothing more than a "disease" that will continue to pollute the world and bring it to its doom. In an effort to prevent this, the evil corporation is trying to take over the world and replace humans with robots. The player will play as part of a special task force the government has assembled in an attempt to infiltrate headquarters and steal highly sensitive information / bring down the corporation.

I will stop here for now for this post. For those interested, you can read more about the development of our game on this blog: http://www.slightlytoastedgames.blogspot.com This is our new team blog and will have posts from everybody in the group.

This Game is......Ingenious!

I've recently had the chance to play the board game 'Ingenious' in my game design class. 'Ingenious' is the English name for the game, however, we played the German version, which was called 'Einfach Genial'. (Everything is the same, just that the original instructions were most likely in German) Let me start by saying that although we had some trouble getting the scoring correct, the game was still very fun to play.

There were 4 of us playing and the game took about 45 minutes, which is not bad and fits perfectly with the time we were given in class to play the game. Personally, I think that if a game takes too long (example: Monopoly), everyone will eventually get bored and pissed off at each other for whatever reason.

The first thing that stands out about this game is the use of little colored cubes to keep track of score. That was quite unique and allowed everybody to see what everybody else's score was at any given time. Also, I liked the similarities it shared with the PC game 'Civilization', where everybody starts off with their own little 'island' and working on their own thing until they hit the turning point later in the game and start planning their strategy. Lastly, I liked the idea of being able to co-operate with each other. I'm not sure that was "allowed" in the instructions, but it was fun co-operating with another player and trying to stop the other 2 players from winning.

Of course, the downside to this co-operating allows for the possibility of a 3 vs. 1 situation if 3 players decide to gang up against one player, thus giving that player no hope of winning. Also, I disliked the idea that it is hard to redeem yourself in the late game, as the stronger player will be able to keep scoring the bonus moves and eventually get all their scores to 18 and automatically win. This leads to my last dislike about this game, the limited randomness. Besides drawing tiles, there really isn't anymore randomness in this game, meaning that more experienced players will almost always have the upper hand against less experienced players.

If I were to change the design of the game, one thing I would definitely do is add a timer rule. Although nobody in our group tried this, adding a timer would force everyone to make a move, and eliminates the possibility of purposely taking forever to make a move in the hopes of frustrating other players. Also, I would make the game a bit more random, most likely through drawing tiles. As an example, each player must empty their entire hand after each turn. I think this would make the game a bit more random and limits the advance planning a player can do. Finally, I think I would limit the amount of bonus moves allowed. It just doesn't feel right if a strong player has all their scores really high, and then they make 1 "super move" in which they place a tile, get the score to 18, get a bonus move, place next tile to get next score to 18, and repeat the process for all or a majority of their scores and allowing them an easy victory. To allow for more strategy, I think I would throw in a few 'single' tiles, allowing players to fill in the odd gaps and can potentially help in some situations.

Here is a picture of the game: