Experience Curve
In Lost Dawn, as in a normal JRPGs, a basic part of the game will be the experience obtained from the encounter against fearsome opponents that the player will find during the adventure. The experience will obviusly need to level up the party's heroes, in order to increase heroes' characteristics (we will talk about characteristics in an other article), to be able to obtaine new Talents and new Talents Points (TP), necessary to activate Talents (we will also talk about Talents in a future article).
Experience Point can be obtained as usual at the and of the battles, in fact each battle successfully faced will provide the player with experience that will be distributed to the party members.
To be able to obtain a good experience curve, we made several test that led us to various problems. Initially we tried to use a single formula to obtaine values to be included in the experience curve, this kind of operation wasn't the best choice due to a growth up of values that couldn't satisfy uf. There was the problem that to be able to level up it took too little experience compared to the previous level.
After some research we noticed that a lot of games, such as Pokemon and Final Fantasy, don't use a single formula but rather multiple formulas, and each formula is assigned to a range of levels, in fact, based on the hero's level a specific formula is used. To be able to find a good experience curve we have decided to create 4 different mathematical formulas that are used within of the total 100 levels of each hero.
Calculation of Time
After obataining the values and inseriting theme in the experience curve, it was necessary to perform various important checks, checks that are based on the avarage time that the player manages to level up their heroes. So ti was necessary to idealize an Excel table in order to create a temporal simulation of the time progress of the levels, to be able to carry out more precise controls so as not to make the levelling of the heroes too much frustrating.
This table is intended to roughly calculated the time to obtain the usefull experience to move from one level to another, or to reach the level 100.
In fact the tool performs these calculation: given the experience to be achieved and the amount of experience that the enemies provide, we are able to know how many fights it takes and the time it takes to reach that level.
Once we had compared the data obtained from the four formulas with the levelling times, we were able to make various adjustment to the experience curve in order to obtain the perfect distribution we were looking for.
