Tweaking the parameters for all the entities in a game until they feel just right is very important if you want the final product to feel polished, professional, and fun. Games that haven’t had their parameters carefully chosen tend to feel sloppy and amateurish. However, given that many games often have a vast multitude of different parameters that can be changed, this process can be very time consuming, especially if done in an undisciplined way.
Unfortunately though, many game designers often perform these parameter tweaks in a very arbitrary and naive way. They make changes far too inefficiently and unimaginatively. As a result, the quality of their parameter choices often suffers greatly as a result.
Luckily though, there is an easy way to greatly improve your ability to choose what values parameters should have, one that also often converges to the best values much faster than an undisciplined and naive way of choosing values typically would.
The key is to use a special technique called a binary search. The concept of a binary search actually originates primarily from computer science, where it is most often used as an extremely efficient way of searching for things in sorted lists. This origination from computer science is part of why many game designers are not aware of the technique, despite how easy to use and effective it is.
For our purposes here, the idea of a binary search is to pick a broad range of plausible values for a parameter, then pick the middle value of that range, and then use whether or not that value feels too small or too large to instantly eliminate the worse half of the range. The remaining half of the range is then subjected to the exact same process.
This process is repeated recursively (i.e. infinitely) until only a very narrow range of values remains, which you then use to choose your value. Since every iteration of this process cuts the number of possibilities in half, it converges to a very good value extremely quickly. No matter how absurdly large the range of values is, the answer will always be found swiftly. It is a very effective technique.
This game dev tip is an excerpt taken from a small book I wrote. You can find more information about the book here on my website.