hello!! i’d like a little bit of suggestion with what should be the maximum and minimum for stats. i feel like 100 would be enough, but i have designed it to be like a life-sim game with a lot of and 100 maximum and 100 minimum would make the game a bit too hard.
picture it this way: i have already have minimum stats for things like fatigue that increase with every action you do, which is at 0. but max stats for fatigue at 100 is a bit too small since the player has the option to work for a few hours and that’ll pile up a lot of fatigue. and when you’re fatigued, you’ll pass out at max fatigue. it’ll make the game a bit , hard??? and unable to function in a balanced way
as for things that decrease like your insecurity levels, it’s also at 100. same problem.
i thought of putting it at 1000, but i’m not sure. i need other ppl’s input …
In the end it is a question only you can answer, is it not? You have a fatigue variable and it increases by one with every action. If your simulation calls for a long sequence of commands (“work for a few hours”), then you will have a higher threshold pass_out for fatigue.
One thing you can do is to normalise the stats before printing. Say you beta tested your game thoroughly and see that a good threshold for fatigue is 6000. If you want to display it as a 0–100 value on screen, you just need to — say — print(fatigue/60). This way you won’t lose granularity and can adjust the output to whichever interval you prefer.
edit: I now see the Twine tag. I am not a Twine user so pick the correct syntax, the general idea stands!
These numbers are all relative. Just saying “fatigue caps at 100” or “fatigue caps at 1000” is meaningless on its own. How often does a player have a chance to increase fatigue? Or to decrease it? By what increments is the stat increased and decreased? For example, having the cap be 100 and changing fatigue by increments of 1 is exactly the same as having the cap be 1000 and changing fatigue by increments of 10. And, of course, “too difficult” is subjective too. Different games need different things.
There’s no objective answer here. The best solution is to get some testers and see what their feedback on the difficulty is.
The best way to tell is to play throughout game yourself regularly, maybe once a week or once after every couple big changes you make, and not use cheats.
A lot of times people just put little cheats or shortcuts in their game for them to skip the boring parts while testing. But if you have parts in your game that are so boring you never play them yourself, you should just get rid of them (shortcuts are still useful when doing daily testing, I’m just saying if you literally can’t bear to play your own game even once without cheating, you need to change your stats).
The other feedback I’d give is you don’t want players to have to do the exact same sequence of actions over and over with no change. So like if it takes a while to figure out the game, that’s good, but if after that they click the same links in the same order 100 times to win, that’s too many. Either there should be new content all the time, or the game should end pretty quickly after you figure out the pattern.