Wednesday, March 05, 2014

Fundamentals of Game Design, Ernest Adams, Chapter 11 : Game Balancing


What is a balanced game -
  • Is fair to the players
  • Is Neither too easy nor too hard
  • Makes the skill of the player the most important factor in determining his success
 Balance is different between PvP and PvE

A well balanced game has
  • provides meaningful choices
  • Avoids dominant stratagies
  • Each strategy must have a chance of victory
  • Players skill must affect success - player skill must be more relevant that chance
PvP -
  • Players must perceive the game to be fair
  • A player who falls behind should have opportunities to catch up
PvE -
  • The player perceives the game to be fair
  • Level of difficulty must be consistent, without spikes or sharp drops
 Dominant Strategies -
  • Strategy that reliablyy produces the best outcome
  • Undesired because players have no reason to use any other strategy
    • Avoiding -
      • Transitive relationships
        • A>B and B>C, then A>C - No reason to get B or C as A is better
      • Assign cost to each choice
      • Impose shadow costs for choices
      •  Upgrades
        • Start with C, then get B, then get A
      • Intransitive relationships
        • A beats B, B beats C, C beats A
      • Orthogonal unit differentiation - unlike others in some way
        • Uniquely different - no more or less powerful
        • Each kind of unit has a unique function
Chance -
  •  Use chance sparingly
  • Use chance in frequent challenges with small risks and rewards
  • Allow players to choose actions
  • Allow players to choose how much risk
Making PvP Games Fair -
  •  Symmetrical games
    • Same rules, resources, victory conditions
  • Asymmetric games
    • Start with identical points, resources etc
    • Players spend point to build units as they wish
    • Players spend points to adjust unit attributes
  • Presistent worlds 
    • Intrinsically unbalanced
    • New players ned protection
    • Rebalanced on the fly
 Making PvE games Fair -
  • Offer challenges at a consistent level of difficulty
  • Avoid learn by dying designs
  • Avoid stalemates
  • Provide information for critical decisions
  • Avoid requiring extrinsic informations
  • Include challenges appropriate for the game
Managing Dificulty -
  • Managing the challenges and difficulty of them to keep the players within a flow state
  • Hand-eye coordination and reasoning skills
  • Challenges similar to those in your game
    • Types of difficulty
      • Absolute difficulty - compare amounts of skill required and stress to that of a similar trivial challenge
      • Relative difficulty - Difficulty relative to the players power provided by the game
      • Perceived difficulty = absolute difficulty - (power provided + in-game experience)
 















  • Establishing difficulty modes
    • Single player games, allow players to choose a difficulty
    • When a difficulty mode is elected, challenges must stay within that range
    • If you can't adjust the difficulty of a challenge, provide a way around it for the easy mode and block the go-around route for the hard mode