Week 10 - A Balanced Breakfast

This week’s important idea is balance, and it reminded me of one of the earliest concepts in our book: challenge. As mentioned in class, while we could just remove all the limitations that stop us from breaking the game, we feel more fulfilled when we create a better-balanced game. “…An ideal difficulty for level design, increasing the challenge to fit evolving player skill by just the right amount” (Macklin & Sharp, Ch. 2) is how the book puts it. Designing a good game means finding the right difficulty that drives players to achieve a goal without making it so easy that there’s nothing to test ourselves against.

Our exercise revolved around the game BattleBattle!, a simple dice game designed to be balanced among multiple characters who all have different abilities. As we designed our own custom characters, two extremes emerged. Some characters were too weak and always lost, and some were too strong and always won. Though constantly winning would be a nice feeling, it ended up being a hinderance for designers trying to make a good character. “If two players have ten different fighters to choose from, each with different powers, there are ten times ten different pairings” (Schell, Ch. 13). For those of us with well-rounded characters, the wins and losses were even, and the player experience was better. Had all the customs characters been at the same level, any one of us could swap cards and play the game on supposedly equal grounds. Of course, that required a lot of back and forth and editing tiny things between tests, and each test might’ve had very different results.

Speaking of the player experience, another thing we had to take into account while balancing was chance. Chance—the random rolls of the dice, the fleeting opportunity to gain back abilities and use others—meant a number of things could unexpectedly happen that might totally ruin your initial idea of balancing. On top of that, if your dice were against you, you might not even get the best sample for playtesting. Overcoming uncertainty has been something brought up before in this class, and “how and where do players make decisions?” (Macklin & Sharp, Ch. 6) is an important question to ask. Part of making a good character was giving the player autonomy. Giving them options like when to use a token and how to use it was a way to fight back against chance or work around the presented difficulty.

“How information is presented, how much is presented, and in what kind of time-frame all impact the player’s ability to make choices and understand their next move” (Macklin & Sharp, Ch. 4). On the other hand, it was important not to overcomplicate the cards. Most rules for BattleBattle! were simple and easy to organize. Having more does not necessarily mean something is better, and optimizing the rules might make things easier for the players. Finding where to draw the line was hard. Maybe there was too much HP, maybe the card’s powers did too much on certain rolls. Making the game is easy. Balancing the game takes hours of work.