The Making Of The Item System

SnuggyPlayz · Jan 29, 2016

Make mythical armour salted. You should also add more mythical weapons for lower levels (30, 15... so on)

Moe_Ronickah · Feb 10, 2016

Well, I caught up with this post, and reread everything that Salted originally posted here. I have to tell you, that I am greatly surprised. I really thought that all of the statistics for armor and weapons were done by going down the list, and throwing darts at a dartboard. Whatever the dart landed on, is what the statistic's average number would be set at.

(But Oh, No! Not Salted. He has to make sure that it all makes sense. )

flip · Feb 14, 2016

Salted said: ↑

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
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Uhhh... I got non of this.

Texlla · Mar 1, 2016

i think Salted started up at 3 AM finished at 3 PM .... gotta say all of this hard work you and Grian and Jumla and the mu- i mean the Content team worked GREATLY so thank you for all your hard work =]

Loggerhead · Mar 1, 2016

hot head quest? ia this another scrapped quest besides riddling concoctions?

Thunder · Mar 1, 2016

SAIFv0 said: ↑

i think Salted started up at 3 AM finished at 3 PM .... gotta say all of this hard work you and Grian and Jumla and the mu- i mean the Content team worked GREATLY so thank you for all your hard work =]
Click to expand...

TheLeader said: ↑

hot head quest? ia this another scrapped quest besides riddling concoctions?
Click to expand...

Is this a necropost, or no?

Loggerhead · Mar 1, 2016

Thunder said: ↑

Is this a necropost, or no?
Click to expand...

no :/

Moe_Ronickah · Mar 1, 2016

Thunder said: ↑

Is this a necropost, or no?
Click to expand...

Has it been 30 days? (The most common question.)
No. => It's not a necropost.
Yes. => It's a necropost. Close the thread, unless it's an admin's thread. Then ask him or her first.

LacrosseCult · Mar 2, 2016

Does anyone know when wynncraft will be back up? please Ive been dieing to know

Kaelan~ · Mar 2, 2016

Salted said: ↑

This is an average value. Some people will have more, some will have less.
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I have 8200 and I am level 82

SilverRedstone · Apr 6, 2016

I understood absolutely none of that. :D

What29 · May 7, 2016

Kaelan said: ↑

I have 8200 and I am level 82
Click to expand...

I have 18050 and I'm lvl 89

CykaBlyat_ · May 11, 2016

i will never understand this xd

Brad S · May 11, 2016

lelelelelelelelel

________________________________

I wont ever understand this either...

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way to complicated XD

hmtn · Jun 15, 2016

I need to somehow get 800 health in 2 levels to not be below average

Moe_Ronickah · Jun 15, 2016

Another necropost?

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The Making Of The Item System

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