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joel joel is offline
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Default Excel as a Game Design tool

With excel you don't have to werite sorts or Finds. the worksheet already
have these features. so if you can put your database into a spreadsheet you
can use these features. You can also use worksheet functions to count the
number of times an item or event occurs.

If you think harder enough you can find good reasons to use Excel. You just
seem to be fighting the idea rather than going along with the flow. Start
Simple. Find one reson to use Excel, then more ideas will come.

" wrote:

Joel wrote:
Excel is good as a tool to visualize what data is in an array. Instead of
storing data in arrays you can put the data into excel.


Understood! However, I feel like I'm still missing something. I was
under the impression that it would be useful to harness sorting and
perhaps functions, to evaluate a design and discover problems.

I don't think it's possible to use sorting with arrays. (I mean, where
we have a list of items in a single cell, sorting only really
considers the first item, right?) Would the idea then be to write a
macro which analyzes somehow the elements of arrays?

Again, my apologies for being so vague. My main problem here is that I
don't understand the idea, so I'm basically just wandering in the
dark.


In a game you move from one location to another location and you have
objects that you collect as you move from location to location.

So you can set up a spread sheet where each row is a location. For example,
the columns can be one of the following

1) Ways of leaving a location
2) Next Location you can go to
3) Objects found in a Location
4) Object Required to perform a task
5) Tasks to perform in a location