The Making Of The Item System

It's 3 am and I'm bored, let's do this!

So as you know, we changed the item system with the Gavel Expansion. I was in charge of that, and today I'll take you through my journey of how it came to be. Hopefully you guys will find this interesting, I personally always loved reading about my favourite game design process.

I started working on this on January 2nd 2015, at 5:31 PM, as Google Doc says. Indeed, this is more than a year ago. Little did I know this would become my life for next months.




Warning! We are now entering one of my design documents. They are usually fairly messy, you've been warned. I will also censor some informations throughout the documents. I used this doc for a lot of stuff, some of it for future updates, but most of it about powders. We don't want you guys to know about that just yet!



Page 1, it all starts with an all caps reminder for future Salted about merchants. Of course. At this point, I already had an idea of what the new system should have, but I was still playing with the design. I ended up using much less colour than what you see. Colours can easily catch the player's eye, so I kept it only for the most important part. I'll go a lot more in depth about the design at the very end.



Even more design stuff for page 2!





Now, I didn't only made items in this document. I pretty much nailed the design for potions and skill points right away. You might notice the skill description says "reduce any NEUTRAL damage". This is because at the beginning, skills only used to affect neutral damage. I quickly scratched that idea once I realised that it would make intelligence very OP and punish you for using elements.





This is for the design of the class selection screen! Kinda glad I didn't went with the very first design to be honest, it looked fairly messy. It's also much harder to compare classes when you use [||||||||||||] instead of 5 big, obvious squares.





More item stuff! At this point I was getting fairly close to the final design we currently have in game.





Now we get to the strange part where I write to myself a lot. Since coding takes a lot of work and time, we can't always start over. I had to make sure the system had no major flaws before we even started working on it. I created tons of hypothetical scenarios to try to identify issues and fix them.

There are 13 more pages of this stuff. So instead of boring you with it, I will show you the Great Spreadsheet of Knowledge.



This is a MASSIVE spreadsheet I've made with every answer about Wynncraft. This is what we use to make sure the items we create are balanced. This is the average health, DPS, and much more, that every player should have at every levels. We don't have the time to go and manually test every weapon, armour, accessory, mobs and XP in-game to make sure that they work, so we use this.

Trust me, it has a lot of stuff. You're only seeing a very small portion of it.





We also use this spreadsheet to... spread the items around. This is what we use to make sure every element can be viable and any level range. Or simply, to make sure we haven't accidentally forgot to make items for a certain level range.



And finally, let me show you the logic behind the final item design that is currently in game.



I don't know if you noticed, but every section is separated in very specific ways. I had to make sure that it would be pretty to look at, fast to get the information you need and easy to understand for beginners.

1. The Envelope
This is what goes around your item. It makes the tier colour very present, and show the beginning and end of an item. This is usually the first thing people will notice when they look at an item.

2. Damage Section
The first section inside the envelope. Most people remember best what they see first and last, so I made sure to put the most important part at the beginning and end. Neutral Damage is completely coloured orange for one main reason: To make it the most important value to look at. It will become a lot more important when powders will be there too.

3. Requirement Section
Right in the middle of the whole thing. If you've noticed, the requirements in earlier designs used to be very colourful. I didn't like that, it made them look way too important. I wanted those to be the last thing a player would look at. The only colour used are green/red to show you if you can wear the item or not.

4. IDs Sections
IDs are the only thing randomized in an item, they are what differentiate the same items. IDs are fairly important in their own way too, so I put them at the end.


So that's it for this time! I could go on for a long time, but I'll stop there for now. I wanted to share something that has probably been a little bit too important to me for the past months and hope you enjoyed it and found it interesting!

- Salted

 

We needed to quickly be able to check the whole item list. Each number means a certain type of weapons (or armour) in order: wands, spears, daggers and bows. If a level shows 0,0,1,0 it means that this level has 0 wands, 0 spears, 1 dagger and 0 bows. If the dagger also has an element, we do the same thing in the element rows.

 

This is an average value. Some people will have more, some will have less.

 

Well the hidden message seems very hard to guess what it says, since we barely have any letters showing... as for the imgur links, I checked all of them for hidden stuff, but they all seem to be links for the images in this thread... We need to find more clues.

The health... yeah, I have 6-7k as well, and I assume it'll stay that way... unless I suddenly find some mythical magical mystical armor. Yup.