What are some ways of implementing a Mid Mission Weapons/Upgrade/Equipment

Hey, everyone. I don't need a how-to but more of the best way to implement. Essential I have levels in which the player earns money to eventually use for upgrades and weapon purchases. However, I'm not sure as to what pace I should allow the upgrades to happen. When is a good time to grant access to a more advanced weapon so it doesn't make the game easy ect... I thought this would actually be easy but its a bit complicated when you try to balance gameplay with difficulty.

 

This is a complicated balancing act that I don't think you'll find a straight forward formula for. I'm facing a similar issue.

The way I'm approaching it is I would want some low level upgrades to be available rather quickly, so the player becomes accustomed to how purchasing and equipping upgrades works. You'll want to price the higher powered weapons high enough so they would simply be unavailable for use in early easy levels.

It is the middle of the game that is the hardest to balance though. You'll want to avoid upgrade stagnation, such as the player got 4 upgrades in an hour but then can't unlock another upgrade for the next 2 hours, which may make them feel they are not making progress. So I'd keep an eye on how much gameplay time it takes between upgrades, and possibly stretch it out from one upgrade to the next, but not create dead zones in the middle where you play for hours without any upgrade. Adjust the power of each new weapon or upgrade to reflect the difficulty of whatever level you would expect a player to be able to unlock it.

 

There are several common approaches to this.

1) Give out each upgrade at a specific point in the game. That way as a designer you always know exactly what mechanics a player has unlocked at every point.

2) Gate content. Its fairly easy to set up a challenge that can only be achieved with a specific upgrade. Make it obvious that the particular upgrade is required. Then any content you put behind the gate can rely on the player having the appropriate upgrade.

3) Make the system self balancing. Set things up so players can redo old content in order to get more upgrade points. A skilled player will finish the game without repeating content or getting all the upgrades. A less skilled player will go back and complete old levels to get the upgrades to make the rest of the game easier.

 

I've worked on something similar to this - the way I handled it is by (secretly) also increasing the NPCs power when the player added an upgrade.

This sounds kind of lame where upgrading the player actually doesn't change anything as the NPCs just get equally stronger, but when then adding additional (stronger) abilities this actually worked out quite well. I also tended to increase the amount of NPCs that would attack the player at one time, which really increases difficulty quite a bit and I personally really liked how this turned out.

I really like this approach, as it lets people play at their own pace and a very experienced player could get through the game at high difficulty due to low level gear (but still get all the abilities). If you'd really want to go to town you could set up something like the WoW transmog function so that they could still look cool with high level gear but still have lower stats.