As discussed in Blog #2, YOU get to decide what creature to cook in GladiEATers! However, how well you cook will make your creature stronger or weaker
What’s that you say? "How do you make sense of that?" "What about combining multiple creatures?" "There’s no way that’s balanced?!" Well, that last one was a statement – not a question. Regardless, here’s the recipe to cooking up GladiEATers!
Stat Serving Size
We want the player’s cooking to impact their creatures. In a way, this is already done, as cooking food faster when time is limited means you get more food creatures. Additionally, we wanted to go further as it just made sense that the better you cook, the stronger the creature… but how much stronger?
Given that the player is already getting more creatures, we didn’t want to overdo any stat advantages and restrained the difference in stats to at most 30%. What we mean is: if the worst Chocolate Cake ever made has 100 Health, 100 Speed, and 100 Power then the best Chocolate Cake has 130 Health, 130 Speed and 130 Power. This fixed range means that even in the most extreme examples, both Combat Chefs get a decent creature and a fighting chance.
Isolated Impact
After testing, each minigame affecting a specific stat felt more exciting than
one minigame affecting all the stats. Rather than the Frying Egg minigame’s 30% impact being spread out amongst the Fried Egg’s health, power and speed, the minigame only affects the Egg’s power and therefore that 30% has a much bigger impact.
Tell me which set of numbers looks more exciting:
11, 11, 11
or
13, 10, 10
This way, each minigame performance feels important. The individual impact of each minigame also pushes the flavour *pun intended* of each cooking game. How fast you whisk an egg will make it faster! It just makes sense.
Cooking Accumulation
Every cooking step that cooks a GladiEATer builds up to that GladiEATer’s stats. Let’s take our flying Omelette GladiEATer. Three minigames make it up: Egg Cracking, Whisking and Omelette Frying. Cracking affects Health, Whisking = Speed and Frying = Power.
Any GladiEATer with less than two minigames will have unaffected stats at their maximum value. For example, a Raw Egg, which only has one cooking minigame - egg cracking, will only have one affected stat. A D performance in the egg cracking minigame leads to bad Health, but with no other minigames affecting the other stats, they stay at their maximum value.
So there we have it; we’ve resolved the cooking to stats mechanic for GladiEATers with 1 Minigame, 2 Minigames and 3 Minigames. We’re done right?
GladiEATers with more than 3 Minigames
What about the case that a GladiEATer has more than three minigames? Sticking to our previous range limit of 30% that we set on the impact of these games, we couldn’t have an additional minigame make another 30% difference to a GladiEATer’s stats. That could make a GladiEATer 60% weaker than a perfectly cooked one
– and that would frankly suck.
Instead, each additional minigame that affects the same stat will be averaged out when calculating what that stat should be. The same goes for combining GladiEATers like Avocado Paste and Toast to make Avocado Toast: we take the average of the minigames affecting Health to get the Health of the GladiEATer and so on.
As example, when making an Avocado Toast both cooking the Toast and mashing the Paste are Health affecting minigames. In cooking Toast, the player scores a C, in mashing Paste they get an A - the Avocado Toast's Health will be as though the player scored a B in one minigame.
Man… I really wish we had some block of numbers separated into columns and potentially colour coded to keep track of all these numbers…
Spread Sheets
The part every designer yearns for, spread sheets! Here we store all the potential ranges of GladiEATer stats. I think it’s important to share this somewhat mundane side to the process, as this how we make sense of it all.
Our best way to display these ranges was to have the maximum values, then to their right, we show which stats are affected by the minigame that makes that GladiEATer. For example, boiling an egg here affects that Egg’s Power. The other stats haven’t been affected yet, so we keep those grey and blank, so we’ll take the max stats for that.
Closing Time
Wow, you’re still here! Given that you are, please let us know what you think about the system. Any problems or even ideas you have for this or other systems? How else could we have gone about this?
What about abilities, how do they interact with Power? What is Speed and how does it affect when a GladiEATer acts? Stay tuned for those discussions and perhaps some actually fun ones in-between!
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