Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
Generalization is one. Design your games so that the core mechanics are controlled
by general rules that don't change with regard to specific game entities or situations.
Tuning each game mechanic separately will very likely lead you to balancing issues,
while if the same game rules are consistent throughout the entire game it will be
easier to make the fine adjustments required, offering the players that optimal level
of engagement.
Keeping code separated from data is another strategy to help you efficiently tune a
game. By putting the statistics regarding the game entities parameter in a separate
file, designers and testers are able to make changes to those values during play test-
ing without affecting the game itself or creating new bugs, thus saving coding time
and coders' patience.
Now that we have described the main fine tuning strategies, we can offer some of the
best practices to do it efficiently, since tuning can be a very time-consuming activity
if you don't use a structured approach.
The following is the approach to user interface design:
•
One value at a time
: While editing parameters values, always change one at
a time, so that you can test the effect of that specific modification and nothing
else. By modifying several parameters at once you can easily lose track of
what caused what, with the result that you cannot identify the very reason of
the issue you desire to solve.
•
Try extreme values first
: Go for big adjustments, not small ones. By doub-
ling or halving values you can easily verify the effects of a specific parameter,
while subtle modifications may produce changes that are hard to notice. Be-
gin with big adjustments and then progressively reduce their entity as you
make reiterated tests, until you get to the ideal value you are searching for.
•
Record your actions
: Keep records of the adjustments you make. As you
delve deeper into the tuning process, you can easily forget what you did in
the previous step. Keeping track of your actions will help you understand
what you are doing and allow you to get back to former values, if you find out
that those values produced better results. This is a significant benefit of using
a source code tracking app to manage your changes; they are automatically
entered into the change log. A list of revision control apps can be found at