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The Adventures of a Coder Nerd Building a Game: Where World of Bleach came from

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Part 1: Gamer Nerd Lsm World of Bleach started as an idea in my mind back in 2009. But the story of how I got there goes back a little further: I briefly played TNR Core 1 in 2007, and ironically enough I was in a medical squad which was based on the structure from Bleach(Captain/Lieutenant/3rd Seat/etc), so I started watching the show because it was recommended to me by the squad leader. I ended up getting busy with school stuff, was taking classes at community college then. But in March 2008 I came back to TNR after core 2 launched and played it pretty hardcore for several months. Back in the days when Current was a mile and a half ahead of every other village, sasukamaru2/Bass was passing 1 million exp, etc. I played it for a long time under the usernames Lsmjudoka/UchihaObito, and trained my main in Current while my alt ran The Walking Dead ANBU in Konoki, which was the top ANBU squad for a while(Granted that wasn't saying much in Konoki). I left around spring 2009 (this was
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WoB Roadmap - What's coming soon, not so soon, and eventually

I get a lot of questions on WoB about "When is Vaizard coming? When is MPvP coming? Can you give us a timeframe?" I can't really give a timeframe for things outside of the current update cycle because with each update, the game changes a little (sometimes a lot) and I look at how those changes have affected the game, which affects my priorities for what I do next. For instance, a change in AoE that decreased the amount their resistance drops with range caused an increase in AoE moves and people using them more for battle holding. When that happened one of the core gameplay aspects of WoB became less fun because there was (still is to some extent) a high prevalence of spamming AoE moves and prolonging battles. That changed my priorities a bit: I moved up battle logs in the line, and I also moved up the battle system overhaul because if core combat isn't fun, that's a big problem. So what can I say about what's coming? Well I'll give you an idea of what I
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Multiple Races / Depth of Content in an RPG

One question I get pretty frequently on WoB is "Why don't you have Vaizard, Quincy, Fullbringers, and Bount?" The answer is that I don't like throwing more races in just for the sake of having more races, I believe they need to fit into a greater design of the game. Vaizard is planned and I will be doing that once I get a few more things that need to be done finished, because balancing the game between two races is hard enough without throwing a third one into the mix. In the case of Bount and Quincy, there isn't much source material to work from compared to Shinigami and Hollow, the two races that formed the core identity of Bleach for around 300 episodes, in combination with their half-races Arrancar and Vaizard. There were only three Quincy shown in the anime, and the Bount race was a half-developed race for a filler arc that was non-canon, and there were maybe 6 or 7 actual Bount characters, which doesn't leave a lot to make abilities: Consider that for th
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The Stuff You Don't Think About #1 - Picking Testers for a New Game

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My latest endeavor is picking the testing/design team for Legend of the Elements. This isn't something I'd wager many people not involved in the development of games think about much, but I'm taking LoE very seriously and thinking hard about the best way to go about each step of development. Picking testers involves a few things. First things first, I made an application for people to fill out. It included basic questions like name/username/availability, but then delved into finding out what types of games the person plays, what they enjoy in games, what they think makes a good game, and some questions about Avatar: The Last Airbender to gauge how they think about the series. Above image:  Tester Applications By reading through all their answers I can get a decent feel for how they think about games, as well as demographical stuff about their preferred game types and playstyle. This lets me accomplish two things: 1) Picking people who are able to critically t
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A Tale of Two Races - Macro-balancing in a PvP-based RPG

Recently I've starting undertaking the task of macro-balancing: Balancing things on the larger scale of the game, not just for instance balancing different attacks to ensure that different strategies are viable, but balancing the two races. I've started these efforts with the new daily boss system that rewards race points for each race based on how much damage they did, and a training boost for the winning race. The race that's currently behind in things like generating race points and having active high-level members initially received the boss spawn notification 5 minutes before the other race, and the boss was 10% weaker against them. This has caused a lot of upset in users of the race that is ahead, who feel that they worked hard for their advantages and the opposing race shouldn't get anything for free. In this post I want to discuss some of the reasons this balancing is necessary, and why I'm doing some of the things I'm doing. Why balance/give handicap
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More about the balancing changes

Tl;DR about the balance changes is battles are going to be lasting longer than they are right now. Health is going up, and chakra/stamina are going up compared to move usage costs so that you won't run out of energy after using 3 moves. Damage scaling and jutsu strength are being adjusted so that also, the difference in power of jutsu from one rank to the next should be slightly less pronounced (yay Genin jutsu aren't completely useless as soon as you hit Chuunin maybe? :D) Once the damage/health values for all the various ranks have been worked out and the jutsu adjusted, AI will be planned out a bit in terms of their length/cost for healing/money gain from AI and the reduction in gains for fighting lower leveled AI. The idea behind this is to make it most rewarding to fight AI close to your level, and make spamming weaker AI only useful for perhaps getting jutsu exp without losing much HP. It's more rewarding and less grindy to do fewer AI battles but have them be harde
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Balancing balance to achieve equilibrium. Plus features coming soonTM

(Fair warning: This post has quite a bit of math numbers and whatnot in the first half or so, if that's not your thing, skip down and find where the features coming soon starts) Balancing has proved an arduous task, particularly with trying to figure out how to properly have things like stat nerfs in the game. I'm trying to move away from static % numbers as these make it incredibly hard to make high-effect jutsu at lower ranks without rendering higher ranks useless. For instance, if you have a Genin speed nerf of 33% for 3 turns, which equals out to ~100% total effect, then what are you supposed to do at Jonin? 40% speed nerf for 3 turns? It becomes a game of either making higher ranked jutsu stupidly OP, or making lower ranked jutsu so low they're useless. 10% speed nerf for 3 turns, anyone? Kappa The key to making jutsu balanced at all ranks is to copy what is probably the most balanced effect in the game: Residual damage. Residual damage is perfect, because it's b
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