Hi everyone.

I've been working on this idea for a game lately and I'm hitting a bit of a wall. I'm trying to build a game that has a very large library of weapons that have many tiers of strengths. But calculating the approximate values that a weapon should have at each tier ends up being very time consuming and extremely hard to get the exact right value it should have.

The way I'm trying to go about building this library is I that for every weapon type, I figure out what values it should have for a level 1 character and then I figure out what values it should have for a level 30 character (which is the highest a character will ever reach). Once I know the beginning and the end, figuring out whats in the middle isn't that hard... At least it would be pretty easy if I just wanted a straight progression, which I don't.

I would like a progression that increases as the tiers go up. This is to make it so every tier is noticeably better than the last.

I don't like the idea of using a straight progression and here's an example of a linear straight progression of values for a weapon to show you why. A level 1 sword that starts at a strength of 1 and every level, the strength of the weapon would go up by one strength. So at level 5 it would have a strength of 5 and at level 10 it would have 10 of strength. Now if you look at the jump from level 1 to level 2, it is a very significant increase in strength. Literally 100% more strength. Compare that with the jump in strength between level 4 and 5. The jump is now only 25% more. At level 10 going to 11, its only 10% more. Essentially, the higher the level goes, the less significant the level of the strength increase becomes.

This is why I want a curved progression throughout the levels of tiers for my weapons and all my equipment versus the straight progression. Every level higher needs to be noticeably better than the last.

I though up of a type of tool that would allow me to generate values with a modifiable curve for my equipment and I looked around the web for something, anything, like it. But no luck.

Here's what I'm looking for:

Some kind of tool where I put down the level one value (start), the final level value (end) and the amount of levels throughout (say 30 or however many I would need at the moment). Once those values are given, that would generate a graph (typical X-Y line graph) with a straight progression between all values and it would also need to have some fields that give the exact current values for each level throughout. Simple enough.

Now here's where it gets a little harder. The graph would need to be interactive. I would need to be able to grab the line of the graph and modify it to create the curve I want in the line (similar to photoshop when modifying the line in the curves menu (image/adjustments/curves)). By doing this, all the values for every level would need to update as the line is moved. That way, once I have the curve I want, I could simply copy and paste each level value.

The last thing that would be cool to have is an option to save the current curve to be able to re-use that exact same curve later.

Does anybody know of a tool that would be anything like this?

If not, would anybody with the required skills be willing to try and build such a tool so we could give it to the game design community? It seem like the type of tool that would be very useful.

Any thoughts or comments?

I'm all all ears guys and gals. I hope to get some feedback on this.

Cheers

Link2be

The most obvious thing to me is geogebra: http://www.geogebra.org/cms/

Lets take a graph as you show, the x-axis could represent level and y-axis could represent strength.
Then all you need is ye olde y=x^2+c or something, x^1.5+c might also work, c would be the strength of the weapon at level one.