Balancing

In my next blog about the content I learn in lectures, I will talk about balancing in games. Now balancing usually comes in near the end of the development cycle but all sorts of balancing can be made before that. For example, in our game Aeolus we needed to do some tweaking for the flying to make sure it was skill balanced. Making sure it wasn't too difficult while maintaining realistic helicopter flying.

When it comes to balancing, there are four different types, I mentioned one of them already and that was skill balancing. The other three types of balancing are: variables, dynamics, and starting conditions.

We will be balancing the variables of the attack and armor for the players and enemies once the attacking is put into the game. This will help improve the quality and fun of the game. To define variable balancing it would be to take the game objects properties such as attack and armor and change their numbers to work with other game objects they interact with.

I don't think we will encounter dynamics balancing until next semester when there are PvP matches in our game. As we balance we want to avoid dominant objects, making sure that there are no "super" units in the game. Every object in the game needs to have it's advantage and drawback. For example, in our game we have a laser that shoots fast but does little damage. So it will be good for light units but bad against armored units.

Our game avoids move issues with positions since we are a helicopter game. There is not much balancing needed for positions unlike in CoD where there would be lots of balancing for positions to avoid campers and spawn campers.

As we talk about spawn, for the next semester when we have multiplayer, spawning in our game will be important. We will have cross map symmetrical spawning, and to avoid spawn camping there will be no respawns.

There are different techniques for game balancing. The four main techniques for game balancing are:

Think Modular
Purity of Purpose
One Change at a Time
Spreadsheets

The technique we are currently, One Change at a Time, has been really effective so far. We don't have much to balance at the moment. I am seeing in the future, once we have lots of different components that can be attached to the helicopter, spreadsheets will be very effective for balancing the game mechanics.