Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
Tuning
Tuning a game involves a series of activities, which are related to balancing, but with
a distinctive aim. Tuning has to do with making a game fun to play from beginning to
its end, possibly for players at the most different skill levels (though it is true that few
games specially aim towards very skilled players, sometimes).
With this last subject we enter a very dark area of games design in general and video-
game design in particular because we get to the point of defining what is fun. Un-
fortunately, a definition of fun would require an entire topic for itself, so we suggest
you to refer to this very interesting Gamasutra article to begin your research into the
topic of fun in Videogames found at
http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/173545/
Sid Meyer
, the founder of MicroProse and designer of several popular strategy
games like the Civilization series (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sid_Meyer
)
once said
that games can be described as a series of interesting choices. From such a perspect-
ive, tuning a game means that a game designer should keep the choices available to
his players interesting throughout the entire game.
Let's now switch to another industry veteran,
Raph Koster
, designer of Ultima Online
and author of a topic
A Theory of Fun for Game Design
, by
Paraglyph Press
, we sug-
gest you to read. In Raph Koster's opinion, play has to do with learning, which means
that games keep being interesting to players as long as they keep learning while play-
ing.
Having this in mind, we can now begin defining what tuning a game means. A well-
tuned game is the one that is fun to play from beginning to end, and a game that
engages players according to the improvement of their gaming skills as they play. A
game that perpetuates on the delicate equilibrium between punishment and reward,
if success is too easy, your players will get bored soon and quit playing. On the other
hand, if the game is too hard they will curse the designer and quit playing.
Tuning strategies
Which are the key strategies we can make use of to effectively tune games?
