Lumberjack Valley
Project Length: (3 Months)
Link to game: Lumberjack Valley on Core Games
Overview: Lumberjack valley is a tycoon game. Fundamentally the gameplay is to cut down trees, collect wood, sell wood, upgrade your axe and continue doing so. With left over currency players can work towards upgrading their cabin.
Aim: The aim of this project was to explore system design, with a focus on the economy & progression systems while creating a relaxing tycoon game.
Case Study
System Design Problem: After building a prototype of Lumberjack Valley I had a progression system in place but it was clunky, I decided I needed to have more control and understanding of the players progression.
From my past experiences at Tafe, personal projects and EA Firemonkeys I knew I would need to approach designing a progression system using Excel or in this case Google Sheets. I decided to create calculators to assist in balancing and crafting player progression.
Below I’ll be going over the google sheets I created for this game, how they work, and what I’d do differently.
Sheet 1: The initial phase involved getting all the data from the prototype into a spreadsheet to have a digestible way of viewing the data.
It also ended up informing me that there was more resource management within the progression system then I had initially thought.
Problem: There is data in this spreadsheet but how can I make this useful?
Sheet 2: Even though I initially thought the data was “easier” to read it really wasn’t. I still had questions to be answered, the first question being, how many trees would I need to cut to afford “type” axe?
The below spreadsheet was sort of the answer to the question. It ended up being a simple calculator where I was able to change the Sell Price Value of a log type and also change the Axe Cost Value.
The calculator would then divide Axe Cost Value by Sell Price Value to provide the number of logs necessary to sell, in order to earn enough Cash to purchase the axe.
eg. Axe Cost Value/Sell Price Value = Logs (of this type) Required to sell
Problem: The major problem is players aren’t necessarily going to be cutting down the exact same tree type, therefore they’ll be earning a variety of log types. So this isn’t a good indicator of player progression but it does provide us with more information.
Sheet 3: With the above calculator I identified part of the progression that I wanted explore more and that was having a better axe be more efficient on the higher earning trees. This would mean players could find a progression path of least resistance in order to get a Legendary Axe sooner.
This new insight lead me to explore how efficient Axe Types were against specific Tree Types. See Below.
The above calculator is used to determine Number of Hits a Tree type must take from an Axe Type before being chopped down and rewarding the player.
Eg, Oak_01 requires 30 hits from a Good Axe while it would require 19 hits from a 2H Good Axe.
In the above spreadsheet I used conditional formatting to identify the “grindiness” of how long it would take a specific Axe Type to take down a Tree Type. With this, the calculator enabled me to quickly balance numbers and craft a progression path where I could assign Axe Types to be good against Tree Types, in turn defining number of hits required.
Sheet 4: The last question I had regarding progression is how long would it take a player to afford a Legendary Two-Handed Axe?
In short… Approx. 2 hours, 35 mins, 43 seconds. The below spreadsheet is how I got to this answer.
At first glance it looks a little confusing but the end result is calculated by a formula found in the cells of the last column:
((Next Axe Cost/Log Turn in Value) * (Axe Swing Time * Amount of Hits))/86400 - it’s then displayed in a duration format.
eg. the top rows formula would look like this: ((15 / 1) * (1.5 * 3)) / 86400
Discovery: During the creation of this calculator I realised I had the opportunity to provide more logs to a big tree of a specific type.
eg. Oak_02 provides 2 Logs for cutting down the tree, while Oak_01 provides 1 Log
System Design Results: Once all of these calculators had been created I was able to play around with their values to balance the progression system. I then brought across the data into the game which allowed me to play test, iterate, rinse and repeat, eventually leading to a progression system that provided players with a rewarding experience.
Overall:
What went well:
Used and expanded my knowledge of google sheets to design a rewarding progression system
I was able to develop a game that has gone on to receive 20,000+ plays
Future Improvements:
Regarding spreadsheets, creating a “library” sheet full of data that I’m able to pull from to use in other sheets/calculators.
This would allow more consistency across the spreadsheet file, less data re-entry and possibly avoid mistakes where values don’t align.
I will also start to think about/approach spreadsheets first when working with game systems (economy, dialogue, progression, etc…)
It’s important to understand how everything will work together but it’s also important to not be to rigid.
Regarding the last point, I ran into the issue with Lumberjack Valley where I found it a challenge to expand on the games economy due to players eventually having almost endless pits of in-game currency.
This could be remedied via big in-game purchases (sinks), or I could look at making the progression curve steeper near the end game, or introduce a rebirth system.
