Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
Now let's consider the players' actions as disturbances to the state of equilibrium the
system is in at any given time. If the system of our game doesn't react properly to
the players' actions, for example, it over or under reacts, the equilibrium state of the
game collapses, thus ruining the gameplay experience.
In a
First Person Shooter
(
FPS
) the player usually controls a character that can
sustain much more damage than the average enemy he faces, which is an example
of an unbalanced condition. To balance the improved resistance of the player's char-
acter, FPSs are provided with tons of enemies for the player to kill. If a FPS had just
one single weak enemy, it wouldn't be so much fun to play.
On the other hand, if the enemies were as tough as the player's character, it wouldn't
be very fair for the player to have so many against him.
In a sports game where two teams compete, each team has the same number of
players so it is not by chance that sending off a team member is considered a strong
penalization for the team sustaining it.
In the following section we provide an explanation for all the most important tech-
niques used in game development to balance games.
Symmetry
The competition between two teams of players in sports can help us describe the
most basic technique to balance games, which is called symmetry. Symmetry means
that each side (or team) starts with the exact same amount of resources. Competit-
ive games always require some kind of symmetry, though there can be cases where
total symmetry cannot be achieved, as happens with turn-based games, such as
Chess and Tic-Tac-Toe, as one player will always have the advantage of the first
move.
Randomization
This is another very basic technique commonly used in board and card games that
consist of letting a random process be in charge of determining the initial gaming
conditions. Since a random process can only lead to fairness in the long run, through
several repetitions of the experience, it is good practice to use methods to overcome
the initial frustration this technique can lead to. One is to make each game session
