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
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
- Players must perceive the game to be fair
- A player who falls behind should have opportunities to catch up
- The player perceives the game to be fair
- Level of difficulty must be consistent, without spikes or sharp drops
- 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
- 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
- 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
- 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 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
