game balance – Jesse Bollinger

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.

Most game designers tend to just modify the parameters of the entities (the objects, items, creatures, abilities, etc) of their games arbitrarily, in an undisciplined way. They just freely change each parameter however they want, and believe (falsely) that the only part of the game’s balance that will consequentially change is the specific thing they modified.

However, this is actually not a safe way of making changes if you care about preserving a game’s carefully calibrated pre-existing balance. Many changes have unexpected effects. It is a common experience among game designers that after making a bunch of seemingly simple changes the balance of the game seems to have shifted in a frustratingly unpredictable way. Luckily though, there is an easy way to often greatly reduce this effect.

Tag: game balance

Game Dev Tip #6: A much faster way of finding the best values to use for parameters

Game Dev Tip #1: How to make changes to gameplay without screwing up existing balance