On Game Design - Game Design Theory - page 38

air-attack capabilities. This illustrates that balance is often irregular and
conditional: a flow chart for illustrating the balance of units in StarCraft
would be extraordinarily complex.
How to Balance Your Game
To balance your game, first (as always) begin with the minimal amount of
content that can express the gameplay. Then, add content only as needed.
Ignore what you think is “expected� for a video game; we have come to
expect an amount of content that completely precludes balance. Be ex-
tremely cautious with asymmetrical forces, as they tend to increase the
amount of balancing work required (read more about this in the “Sym-
metry� section).
You also should allocate time in the development schedule for bal-
ancing; this time will be used after the game is considered completely
done. At a certain point you'll need to put new features on lockdown,
and just play-test. Get friends to test the game. Find forums online and
have people sign up to become beta testers for your game. Have them
report what they find back to you, but don't make the mistake of trusting
every balance report: many times people simply have bad games or con-
fuse their own lack of skill for some kind of imbalance. Further, people
generally will want you to increase the strength of their favorite things.
Be wary of these kinds of recommendations.
As you find imbalances, it's generally good to have a light hand.
Make the smallest changes you can to try to fix the imbalance, because
large changes can cause all kinds of unforeseen problems. Also, know
this: there is no shortcut to balancing a game. Fixes such as dynamic dif-
ficulty adjustment , wherein a game automatically adjusts its difficulty for
the player, makes no sense and is a complete abomination of the purpose
of games. This feature rewards bad play and punishes good play, which
is obviously the exact opposite of what a game should be doing. Many
companies seem to think that these kinds of Band-Aid approaches to
game balance will work, but instead they make a game feel dead, lifeless,
and undynamic. Other examples of such balance Band-Aids are global-
ized leveling in The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion , rubberbanding in Mario
Kart 64 , and the AI Director of Left 4 Dead .
Theme
As I mentioned in Chapter 1 , a theme is a “literal� layer of information
placed atop game mechanisms. Some games have very little in the way
of a theme, and some games are chock full of it. What you'll be hear-
ing from me again and again in this topic is that you can't allow theme