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GDS2015 spreadsheet_design
- 1. B E S T P R A C T I C E S F O R C O L L A B O R A T I O N B R I A N D A V I S Spreadsheet Design
- 2. Why?
- 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
- 7. Tool Options
- 8. Building Systems in Excel
- 10. Balancing With Spreadsheets Game Values Game Data .XLSX Formulae
- 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
- 24. Named Tables
- 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
- 30. Collaboration
- 31. Data Validation as Spellcheck
- 32. Tokens
- 34. Exporting Design .xlsx • Standalone Export .xlsx • References Design.xlsx • Contains no formulas Game Values • Imports the export values
- 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
- 37. Build a Character Generator
- 38. Build a Character Generator
- 39. Make a Formula Reference Sheet
- 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
- 42. Contact Me @BrianDavisM briandavism.com The End
Editor's Notes
- 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