Mr Sun Studios - All about Design, Programming and Game Development.

Scoring Systems are found in almost every game out there. They are a key component in your game, but often are forgotten among all of the other pieces of the game that are thought to be key.

The idea of scoring is simple. Whenever the player accomplishes a task within the game, they are rewarded with points to add to their score. Although points don’t always have come in the form of a score (e.g. experience points or money), they are points nonetheless. As the player accomplishes tougher tasks, he/she gains more points. This is generally how scoring systems work in most games.

So, now let’s return to the point. How do we make our scoring system fair? It is actually much harder than it seems. I’m going to try to simplify the process into a few steps

Step 1: Determine the Difficulty Level of Tasks

The easiest, and probably the most common way to determine the difficulty level of each task is to do it yourself and try to guess how the player would feel. Depending on the kind of game you have, this could turn out to be pretty inaccurate. Because you are the developer of your game, all tasks that require experience will come easier to you, while some others won’t affect how you perceive their difficulty. This difference in perception can really mess with you. This is why you should ask others to test the difficulty of these tasks. Tell them to rate it on a 5 point scale, 1 being the easiest, and 5 being the hardest. This scale could be used also if you don’t have access to testers and have to do it yourself.

Step 2: Create Scoring Increments

Scoring increments are the base amount of points the user gets for completing certain tasks. For example, you could play a brick game. For each brick you break, you could get a variety of different point values. Perhaps you earn 1 point, or you earn 100 points. Those would be the base scoring increments.

If you have many different ways in your game to earn points, you should probably go for higher scoring increments, like 100 or 1000. If you have a very simple game, I suggest lower ones. Of course, it is all up to you. But, you should note that as scoring increments go up, the level of care that the user has about their score goes down. 10 points compared to 500 points seems like a lot more of a difference than 1000 to 50000 points. We simply can’t think in terms of those high numbers.

Step 3: Assign Points to Different Difficulties

Assuming that you’ve done both of the previous steps, you can now give each difficulty level certain point values based on the scoring increments. The amount of points in between each difficulty level will vary based on the scoring increments themselves and the gap of difficulty of your difficulty level. Of course, there will be certain tasks (like boss battles) that will not fit in the scale of points.