Fight Cycle Design Diary: How to do loot distribution

Fight Cycle

Right now - well, I've never really designed a gear system/loot distribution system before so I'm figuring one. (note: I first posted this over at Fight Cycles indie-resource discussion thread)

I'm thinking I'll have some lists of item hand made (as in their data is hand typed!) by me, at a common, green, blue, purple sort of distribution. Each comes from a tier, which determines the level of skill required to wield the weapon/wear the armour. Basically in units of 100 - so you maybe need 0 skill, 100 skill, 200 skill, etc, to use a particular weapon or armour.

I'm thinking you have a loot roll that has a certain percentage for common, green, blue, purple (that latter ones having a lower chance) from your own tier. So if you are skill 255, then that loot roll is for tier 200 skill items.

You also have before tha an overall roll before that, where you have a small chance of getting lower tier items and an even smaller chance of getting an item from one tier above you.

That's my idea, anyway. I was stuck before because I thought that if it was a straight roll within your tier, then if I put in alot of common items, you'd have more chance of getting a common item - which seems a sucky result and not at all why I would be putting in more common items (I'd be doing it for variety, not to incrementally make you have to have common items more often).

Not sure if anyone is tracking this (perhaps X, who plays in Driftwurld as well, might be checking out this discussion thread), since I'm not ultra fast at implementing stuff (particularly stuff that I have no feel for whether its anything that thrills people), but I thought it'd be good to give an update.

I'm really hoping to overall finish this game. I might keep adding new touches/items as they come to me, for years to come. But for the overall structure, I'm really hoping to just finish this - it's proving harder than I thought, and that's when I chose what I thought was a more conservative design!

Fight Cycle: Update

Quite a few additions since last time - A gym, a yard where you can grow food to eat or sell the excess, and a moves system you can optionally use (by default it's on). I really like the yard system because each click on the fight, main or gym pages is recorded and each day more food grows in the yard, relative to it - then any extra that builds up is sold to an NPC store, which sets up how much game money will be distributed at the end of a fight cycle. I really like how the economy rises from actual people and their actions!

http://fightcycle.freehostingcloud.com/login.php

Originally I posted this over here, should have done it here first otherwise google might think I'm just cutting and pasting others content! When it's my own, but I always seem to type it up somewhere else first! Bad habit!

Fight Cycle: Persistant Browser Battle Game

I wrote this in a non contiguous 7 days or so. Though really how long did it take to learn everything up to it? A lifetime? Anyway, I wrote it so as to write something I could just finish, instead of another started and aborted beginning of a grand project never completed. And even as it's relatively simple it still pushed at my abilities, in order to finish it. That was another reason to write a simpler one - man's gotta know his (current) limitations.

It's a cute little battler - I like that you can win it and get your name on the front page during the next 14 day cycle, as well as recorded in it's history (really aught to add some code to pull names from the history and show them on the front page as well, at some point).

Yeah, I was working on a scalper game (and still am), but was moved to finish something real quick, before taking on another big project.

Anyway, give in to your urge to lord over others and leave long lasting wounds on their PC's! That's how I wrote it and I play it too (user name: Blake)!

http://fightcycle.freehostingcloud.com/login.php

PS: Yet again I post this on another forum and then think shouldn't that have gone to my blog first!