Levels

I gotta add the leveling system to the game.

'Cause when I get bored of refreshing the screen in the game to see what my changes look like as I'm programming something, I go out and strangle a few monsters (with no items and my bare hands heh) for a couple minutes and I always gotta worry that I might trigger a level up when I ain't got the code in place for it.

Sometimes little numbers are cooler and more brutal and satisfying than big numbers.

That's how DK's first level works, its like, 18 experience points to second level, and 1st level monsters are 1 or 2 experience points each.

I kinda like that.

Its got the standard "takes more monster kills per level" deal as you level up, so by the time you are 50th level, its taking like a hundred and sixty thousand experience points to get to the next level and monsters are two hundred something experience points a piece, but all the DK stuff is hard coded and I don't wanna do it that way 'cause it just seems silly to me to make a table of crap for that and do queries when you can just make an equation for it.

I can even do hell levels and stuff with an equation.

Should I make my thing like that?

Anybody got any preferences for it to be another way?

I'm not really into the cult-building cognitive dissonance garbage so I don't actually care how it works, no matter what kinda system I do, the stuff you get from leveling is gonna eventually matter less and less to you ('cause those "increases" are not going to "increase" as you level) and things will reach some sorta plateau.

There'll probably be other ways to get experience points besides killing monsters, too, y'know, like quests and all that, but I wanna base the thing on the monster killing.

So like, how many experience points should you get for killing a monster that's your size?

And as you level up?

And how many experience points should it take to reach the next level as you level up?

And should there be a bonus for killing things bigger than you, and a penalty for killing stuff smaller than you, where junk eventually "grays out," or should it be a flat sorta thing, like, you get a certain amount of experience point per level of the monster that you killed (or more likely it'd be calculated off the monster's hitpoints and not its level) and that is that.

I kinda like the flat thing, since I don't gotta ever let anybody bother each other and fight over spawns and all that crap, I don't really have any reason to make shit "gray out" to try make you wanna leave the newbie yard or whatever.

Heck, the way I figure it, if little shit is gonna bug you, you better get paid for it heh.

Should a first level monster give you 2 experience points, and a second level monster give you 4, and a 50th level monster give you 100?

That seems kinda crappy to me.

Or should that and the experience points you need to level do the traditional deal where they jack everything up and make it hard to figure out in your head?

So a first level monster is worth 4-6 experience points, and you need 54 experience points to get to level 2, and second level monsters are worth 7-9 experience points, and it takes 126 experience points to go from level 2 to level 3 (or a total of 180 experience points to get to level 3 from level 1), and all that kinda crap.

Somehow the obfuscated logic of the "scrambled eggs" thing seems better, aside from the cult building time investment boil-the-frog-slowly thingie where you make people do more and more.

I guess that's 'cause it makes it hard for your brain to turn it into 99 bottles of beer on the wall.

Y'know, like, you can't really figure out how many monsters you need to kill until you kill enough that you can use a calculator to figure it out (once you figure out how much monsters are worth) or you kill enough that you can figure it out by eyeballing your experience bar.

I guess I oughta do it that way.

Should I have "hell levels" and stuff?

"Oh that level 35 is a bitch!"

'Member that shit?

Bad stuff for no good reason that gives folks some shit to complain about together and feel sympathy for each other and stuff heh.

"Oh I remember when I had to do 35! I almost quit the game! Level 60 is even worse!"

Goddam cult crap ahaha.

Oh, we can have "bonus to experience points" items and stuff too.

And I was planning on trying to make "more the merrier" style grouping, where everybody gets the experience points and loot for monsters as if they killed them all by themselves, and that would tend to make leveling (and powerleveling) easier (and grouping more fun), but my game is evil enough with the way it does encounters and the way that monsters are hard to control to make it work out so that a Big Guy would be better off escorting his Little Buddies around places that fit the Little Guys better (a bunch of Big Guys and one Little Guy would do better, but eventually the Little Guy is gonna get it heh).

Big Guys with friends in real life that don't play as much wouldn't mind it working like that, that's way better than not being able to group with your buddies at all 'cause you'll ruin their points or something, and even if the loot is crappy to you, you can always give it over to your midget pals (and obviously you play more than them, 'cause you are bigger, so you can keep doing whatever it was that made you bigger than them when they ain't around heh).

So that's gotta be included in the deal some too.

UO was the only game that really did the more-the-merrier any-level-guy-can-come-along style grouping thing right, but that "point for every three swings of your sword" stuff has its own problems heh.

Well, Mount&Blade worked out really sweet, if you think about it from the perspective of having the NPCs you were in charge of being your "little buddies," y'know, 'cause you had tons of guys of all shapes and sizes in those fights, that's more like the way that I'm looking at it, 'cause my mathematical model fits that better.