6. T O O L O P T I O N S
S P R E A D S H E E T S A S A B A L A N C I N G T O O L
M A K I N G M O R E R E A D A B L E S P R E A D S H E E T S
C O L L A B O R A T I O N A N D E X P O R T
I M P R O V I N G P R O F I C I E N C Y
Topics
11. Balancing With Spreadsheets
Good for
Games with lots of content
Complex interplay
Games as a service
Not great for
Small games
Curated experiences
Games without currencies
14. Application
Income
• Players make 10 coins per
minute
Behaviour
• Players play 3 minute
sessions
• Three times per day
Formula
• A shield should take 2 days
to earn
Cost
• A shield costs 180 Coins
Income
• Players deal 5
damage per punch
Behaviour
• Players can punch
twice per second
Formula
• A dragon should take
15 seconds to K.O.
Cost
• Dragons have 150
health
16. Don’t exceed your screen width
Horizontal scrolling can be tricky
If each row is an item, you should see
all of it’s attributes at once.
Hiding rows can make it hard
to write formulae
Hidden rows also
complicates error detection
Watch out for…
17. Only have one data type per column
This example is
readable
Whitespace is the
enemy
Makes it difficult to
compare items
Useless
Whitespace
18. Never merge cells
Lookup functions break
Formatting becomes more difficult
Only use as a last resort
Only for presentation documents
Formulas
which break
=COLUMN()
=HLOOKUP()
=INDEX()
=LOOKUP()
=OFFSET()
=ROW()
=TRANSPOSE()
=VLOOKUP()
19. Never wrap text
Text wrapping on one
column doubles your
whitespace
Consider text keys or a
separate document for
long text strings
20. Comments
Comments can be placed in a
cell by clicking Insert>New
Comment
These are good for long comments
to describe a column
Comments can also be made
in a formula using +N(“”)
This formats the text as a number
which it reads as +0 so it will not
change the outcome
21. [ A L T ] + [ ↵ R E T U R N ]
- O R -
[ C T R L ] + [ ⌘ C M D ] + [ ↵ R E T U R N ]
Writing Readable Formulas
S H E E T R E F E R E N C E S
• K e e p y o u r t a b n a m e s s h o r t
• 5 characters or fewer allows more tabs to
appear on the bottom of the screen
• I u s u a l l y c r e a t e a c o n t r o l p a n e l
s h e e t n a m e d “ C ” t o k e e p f o r m u l a s
s h o r t
22. Nested IFs are hard to read
Above is a formula for
rounding to 2 Significant
Figures
Below is a more elegant
solution
Formula
23. Intuitive formula building
=B8*86400/M8
=B8/M8*86400
=(B8/M8)*86400
=(B8/M8)*(60*60*24)
=(value/time)*day
=Income per day
25. A warning about names
Named Ranges != Named Tables
Names cannot be reused in Excel
Tables are obvious, ranges are hard to see and easy
to break
26. Color Code Titles and Tabs
Color cell A1 to match
the tab
A unique font turns it
into a logo
28. Use conditional formatting to hide useless data
Turning useless values
white makes this table
easier to read
The same can be done
with expected error values
V
S
36. B U I L D A C H A R A C T E R G E N E R A T O R
M A K E A F O R M U L A R E F E R E N C E S H E E T
B U I L D R E C I P E S
Improving spreadsheet
proficiency
40. Build Recipes
When you find something that works make a recipe
=INDIRECT(“R”&MATCH($A1,Sheet!$1:$1,FALSE)
&”C”&MATCH(A$1,Sheet!$A:$A,FALSE),FALSE)
=LINEST(knownXs,knownYs^{1,2,3})
=“x3”*lvl^3+”x2”*lvl^2+”x”*lvl+”b”*(max-min)+min
Hello everybody.
Today I’m going to talk about the exciting world of game spreadsheets…
And some methods I’ve developed to improve your design work
and to improve the experience of your colleagues who have to deal with your messy spreadsheets.
I’ve found that most designers have a descent understanding of excel. Perhaps you have used it to track assets, or input some data
But once you really get into Excel as a tool for creation you can do some amazing things, like creating a whole game prototype to see if your system ideas are working without any help from a programmer,
or create a system which keeps the whole game balanced so you can go work on another game and have a content manager build new content without fear that they will ruin the game’s economy.
And even though many of us use excel daily to make games, most of the resources online talk about solutions for banking and data analytics. So I’ve been collecting useful tricks I’ve learned over the years and I’m here to share them with you.
I got my start as a systems designer by playing table top RPGs with my friends when I was 9
When I was 12 I started working on my first RPG ruleset
And at 14 I was crunching the numbers to find flaws in Warhammer 40k’s ruleset
I got my start in 2003 as a tester at Pronto Games working on GBA titles. I have a bachelors degree in game art/design and I have spent the past 8 years working as a systems designer
So in an effort to share what I’ve learned I’m going to cover the following topics…
The cycle for balancing is usually to make up some values, playtest them and then itterate
Most numeric systems are just
incomes and costs
In the course of making your spreadsheets someone else will have to understand them. Also you from the future needs to understand what you were thinking.
Touch pad mice can feel too sensitive, lateral middle finger movement is difficult, SHIFT+scroll is necessary for regular mice.
I only use row grouping and hiding for sections which are obvious when they break.
----- Meeting Notes (9/27/13 15:15) -----
add horizontal example
If you really want to merge cells, just be prepared to spend a lot of time fixing formatting issues and having other people break your sheets
Notice all the wasted space in this sheet
Above is a real formula I wrote once. It rounded to the nearest 2 sig figs. Below is the solution I use now.
The text is still there, it’s just invisible.
Making your sheets more legible is a good start but working with others is a tricky part of development and not something that Excel handles very well
Unchecking the in-cell dropdown turns data validation into spellcheck.
When you are working with other designers you will need to make sure that you aren’t all editing a file at the same time
.XLS files are binaries and cannot be merged by version control software
We use a physical token
If you are just starting to use Excel professionally or you are trying to improve your skills here are a few techniques I recommend.
One of my favorite exercises is to make a character generator for any pen and paper RPG
Here is one I build to help me learn the new D&D ruleset.
I used this sheet to try and use mostly named tables to make the formula’s easier to read
I’ve already repurposed parts of this sheet on 3 other games at Wooga
Since I do a lot of paper prototyping this was also a good time for me to practice exporting data to a .pdf
Excel to indesign exports are another thing I use for creating my paper prototypes
I try and do this exercise about once a year to try and keep everything fresh in my head.
Go to Excel’s help page and copy the list of every formula.
This will help you come up with new ways of solving problems and help you find combinations of formula’s you haven’t used before.
I’m working on one for the newest version of excel now and I will post it on my webpage when it’s done
