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Game Balance - the Holy Grail of game development. We all desire it and aim for it, yet there always seems to be something wrong with it. Countless days poured on tweaking values, spending more time looking at an Excel sheet than your own family, all to grasp the mythical “balance”.
So, how can we reach our “Perfect Game Balance”? Can we even reach it, or is all of this just a massive waste of time, and should we just let the AI overlords take the reins?
How to define “balance”
While “game balance” can have many different definitions, I believe it can be understood as “values that provide players with the desired experience.” Would Super Mario be better if Mario could jump twice as high or if Koopas moved twice as fast? Those are the kinds of questions we ask ourselves when balancing our games.
Once you define what counts as a “desired experience” for your game, this allows you to start moving in that direction and approach what counts as “perfect game balance” for your game.
But then comes an issue: difference in player skill. You can define the desired experience as “challenging”, “casual”, or whatever you want, but the same balance that player A will consider “too hard”, player B might consider “too easy”. This is why we have different difficulty levels in games, to try and provide the “desired experience” to as many players as possible.
Or you can always take the page out of Souls-like games and tell players to just “get good”; this is also a valid approach! Just remember that more difficulty levels = more work for you as a developer.
For the W.A.N.D. Project, we aim to provide players with a challenge that doesn’t feel impossible or cheap, pushing them to try and improve different builds. Let us know how we’re doing! :)
Fun vs difficulty
When balancing games, you will inevitably encounter the issue of “difficulty vs fun”. This is where we usually refer to the concept of “flow”, being so immersed in the game that you forget the flow of time. If you ever played a game “just for a little bit”, only to realize that it’s not the same day because of birds chirping in the morning, that was the flow.
Flow is understood as a balance between Challenge and Skill, as shown in the picture below.
In order to create the flow state in the player, we need to carefully balance the challenge that the game puts in front of the player with how much player skills are improving while playing the game.
Balance that keeps the player within the flow channel is what we call “fun”. But how can we know that we’ve achieved the flow? After all, it’s not like players will tell us to our faces directly and with great emphasis…. Or will they?
Testing is king!
It turns out they will, and they might even be delighted to do so! But only if we give them the opportunity. This is where playtesting comes into play.
Playtesting is doing what every game developer dreads the most: letting other people play your game. But as scary as that might sound, it’s also absolutely necessary for your game to become its best possible version. At the end of the day, you’re just a single pair of eyes; it’s almost impossible to notice everything by yourself.
While the topic of playtesting is big enough to warrant its own separate article (please let us know if you’d like to read it!), for game balance, it’s practically the only way to confirm if we managed to achieve the “desired experience” from our players. While playtesting, you’re on the lookout for:
- What emotions do players show when playing your game? Are they what you were aiming for? If not, why?
- What parts of the game are they getting stuck at? Why?
- Is there a strategy that everyone organically gravitates towards? If so, why?
- Are they interacting with all mechanics? If some mechanics are ignored, why?
- Look at players' reactions when using something new for the first time. Are they enjoying it? Are they disappointed? Why?
- Be on the lookout for when players stop showing any emotions or commenting / reacting to what happens in the game for an extended period. This tells you that they’re getting bored.
- Remember that a frustrating game is still better than a boring game.
While emotions are important to look out for, cold hard data will also be extremely important for you, and playtesting is a good way of obtaining them. You want to gather information about the player session, things like:
- Heatmaps to see which parts of the game players interacted with the most
- What options do players choose when playing the game? How do they influence the outcome?
- How many gameplay resources (gold/health/items, etc.) did they use when playing the game? How much did they obtain?
- How much time did it take them to finish the game? To finish a specific segment?
- How many times did players die? Or lose a match?
Overall, gather as much data as possible, but only as much as you need to make the game better. Avoid data overload!
A great option is to release a free demo on Steam/Epic Store/GOG and create a Discord server for your players to gather and discuss the game. I promise you, every game developer WANTS to talk with their players and hear their opinions, even if it’s negative. So don’t be shy and hop into our W.A.N.D. Project Discord; we’d love to hear from you!