Hello and welcome back to Day 3 of Daily DevLog Week! Hope you’re all doing well and staying wrapped up in the cold weather. As promised, today we are going to be looking at how we plan to “score” fights within Wrestling Forever : Jobber.

            So, the first step of devising a scoring system was to figure out what exactly we wanted players to do. Seeing as the game was no longer about winning and losing, and had shifted focus to trying to lose while making the other guy look really good, this was difficult. Eventually, around the same time we settled on the QTE fighting prompts over the rhythm inputs we realised that we had our answer.

            When we were considering rhythm action we had thought about scoring the player similar to rhythm dancing games. That is to say that players would receive a “Heat” level that’s would last the duration of the fight, staying at a level appropriate to how well they hit inputs on time. This “Heat” value would there be used by the game in the form of a multiplier. This means that, say if the player did excellent they’d get a 2 times multiplier, this would then be applied to the base level of the money and popularity that the player would be earning. Similarly, if a player failed to hit a majority of the input on time they may have received a negative multiplier, for example 0.5, which would ten lower the base incomes for the fight. Meaning that we ended up with a formula something like this;

(base score)(rhythm bonus) = earned ex / money

            With how simple this was to set up we also discovered that we could add in extra possible bonuses, so that as the player progressed and learned the game they would have a better opportunity to improve their scores and progress further, faster. 

            However, as I mentioned above, we decided to move away from Rhythm Action, as it would have required more post production polishing than we would have time for. Instead we decided to alter the game some to use the aforementioned Quick Time Events. Thankfully this didn’t change our fancy formula too much. This is because, in most games that feature QTEs there is precedent that players only have a certain amount of time to hit the correct inputs or else they fail out. This meant we w could cut down some f the polishing and balancing required for a good rhythm action game, and keep the formula we liked for tracking how well players are doing.

            And there you have it, a peak behind the scenes of how we stopped, reassessed and pivoted a core part of the game to keep it on schedule. This is obviously something that happens a lot in games, and something that has fouled many choices our development team has had to make, but once you realise why you’re making those decisions, they make a tonne more sense.

              Until next time, stay warm and do something for you!