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Setting the scene.
What’s up, world?
For anybody who works in and round tremendous small indie online game studios, you’ll have observed that people typically have a number of roles within the venture. Folks put on many hats. So many hats. Extra hats than a party, fancy wedding ceremony and a day on the races mixed. Maelstroms of hats. Hats all over the place. Hatters gonna hat, in any case.
So for a venture like our upcoming recreation Orbitect, which is an formidable physics-based building roguelite with a posh tapestry of configuration, it was tremendous essential that we utilised our time in a smart, environment friendly approach with the intention to keep as targeted and environment friendly as potential in order that we might realise our imaginative and prescient with out spending many years within the course of and tying ourselves in a myriad of nebulous (albeit rewarding!) knots.
This submit is about an instance of how our small however mighty group have used some spreadsheet-based automation to streamline picks of our manufacturing with the intention to iterate and refine our gameplay balancing at pace and scale. We’ll be writing extra sooner or later about precisely how we tackled the balancing itself, in addition to how Orbitect is utilising configuration on the programming aspect, however for now — be happy to deal with your self to a bit of perception into how we’ve joined the 2 collectively in data-driven concord.
What’s our downside?
In Orbitect, the participant makes use of blocks and stat-based panels to craft an area station able to destroying waves of area particles. Destroying that area trash earns the participant cash and sources to restore, improve and broaden their station, so on and so forth, advert infinitum (effectively, till the top of the marketing campaign at the least). We’ve designed many levers of configuration with the intention to management the circulate and really feel of gameplay. For instance:
Panels:
How a lot does one value? What’s it’s well being? Power? Defence? Velocity? Effectivity? How a lot to improve or restore? How a lot injury can it do? What description does the participant see?
Particles: How huge, or metallic, or explosive are they? How a lot cash is earned from destroying it? What’s the chance of reward if the particles is destroyed? What reward does the participant get in the event that they destroy it?
Waves of particles: When and the way does particles seem? How a lot particles seems in a given wave? How lengthy does the wave final? What does the play get for clearing a wave?
Wave Patterns: What kind of the way can particles seem in a wave? Which route? How typically? How briskly? Does it goal a particular a part of your station?
Bosses:
When within the marketing campaign do they seem? How tough are they? What do you get for defeating them?
Stat Rewards: What rewards can be found and for which stats? Are all panels affected from a reward? How a lot is rewarded?
Gameplay boosts: How a lot does each value? How a lot do they have an effect on gameplay?
- Different participant values:
How a lot cash does the participant begin with? You get the image…
All in we’ve got simply over 70 configurable attributes to work with, every with dozens (or extra) entries comprising the general configuration of the sport. Are you able to think about if we needed to preserve observe of this manually in-engine? Tweaking the configuration to refine the sport’s marketing campaign expertise can be a time consuming, depressing, communicative monstrosity and would almost certainly fail earlier than it started. Fortunately, we’re making use of an information interchange format referred to as JSON
to retailer attributes and their values throughout varied recordsdata.
Right here’s one excerpt for instance:
{
"wavePatterns": [{
"name": "Wavepattern 1",
"description": "Rest wave",
"speed": 1,
"direction": "All",
"spawntype": "Every 5 Seconds",
"target": "None",
"difficultymultiplier": 1
},
{
"name": "Wavepattern 2",
"description": "Build Back wave",
"speed": 2,
"direction": "All",
"spawntype": "Every 4 Seconds",
"target": "None",
"difficultymultiplier": 1
}
]
}
On the subject of refining the sport design itself — updating a number of values shortly and precisely immediately within the JSON continues to be a problem. It’d nonetheless require us to manually scroll by way of and edit varied attributes. And if we had a number of waves, particles, panels and many others within the recreation (which we do), then we’d have to do that a number of occasions.
So what did we do about it?
Enter: The Spreadsheet.
That’s proper. We’ve employed the outdated dependable stalwart that holds your complete information working world collectively — a spreadsheet. We used one to put out the varied configurations throughout a number of tabs. For instance:
These are placeholder values! Don’t go getting all excited.
Not solely is this handy due to using rows, columns, and formatting that everyone knows and love, however as a result of we will make use of formulation to create feux-JSON configurations within the spreadsheet itself. For instance:
We specify a row and column from our straightforward to grasp spreadsheet that corresponds to a cell containing an attribute identify. We do the identical for that attribute’s worth.
We hardcode in some curly brackets that will probably be wanted within the JSON regardless of the configuration values.
We add a Y/N column to flag whether or not the worth is a string (as a result of if that’s the case we want speech marks for a string).
We use the “oblique” perform and Char(34) with the above to create a method that acts as a concatenation and pre-populates the feux-JSON with spreadsheet values the place they’re wanted. Some logic can be wanted right here to take away a comma from the final worth in an encased sequence.
We are able to scale the JSON for all entries by including 1 to our row reference (or a letter alongside for our column reference) within the subsequent row down so that each one rows from the spreadsheet are captured within the JSON file.
- Because of the superb JSONLint for offering a wonderful validator!
Right here’s a snippet of 1 as an example what it appears to be like like:
Making the feux-JSON.
Nice! That’s already saved us a while trawling by way of JSONs. Nevertheless, we had been nonetheless possibly spending round 5 minutes copying, pasting, zipping up and sending to at least one one other each time we wished to tweak a number of parameters and take a look at out the gameplay implications. Given we’re iterating repetedly throughout our improvement, we had a possibility to additional assist ourselves. So we utilised a google apps script (with because of this thread, and this thread, in addition to Chat GPT!) to mechanically copy and paste our feux-JSONs into (actual life) JSON recordsdata, and retailer them onto a particular folder in our shared google drive, for anybody in our group to choose up and play of their native construct (and finally use in the primary improvement construct). We even made a bit of button to run the apps script and export them!
Not the very best trying button on this planet, however I’m a spreadsheet geek, not an artist. What would you like from me?
Behold! Exported JSONs scorching off the press (of the button).
Now on the click on of a button we’ve got recent Orbitect gameplay configurations prepared to make use of the following time we run the marketing campaign in-game. The couple of hours invested in making these little improvements (can I be so daring as to name them improvements? Most likely! In the event you’ve learn this far down then you should like this method too, proper?) has saved us exponentially extra time within the run as much as launch. It has paid for itself inside a few improvement days.
So there we’ve got it. Is it rocket science? Hardly. Only a good outdated spit-and-sawdust method to saving us a bit of little bit of time, lots of of occasions. Little friction-busting steps like this alongside the best way assist our group to launch a recreation that reaches for the celebs, and takes out the trash alongside the best way.
Orbitect is a building roguelite mashup accessible now for PC (Home windows).
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