Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
CHAPTER 11
Game Balancing
To be enjoyable, a game must be balanced well—it must be neither too easy nor too
hard, and it must feel fair, both to players competing against each other and to the
individual player on his own. In this chapter, you'll learn what qualities a well-bal-
anced game has, and how to balance your own. We'll begin by examining dominant
strategies and how to avoid them. We'll look at ways to set up and balance both
transitive and intransitive relationships among player choices and how to make them
simultaneously interesting and well balanced. We'll also look at ways to incorpo-
rate chance into games in such a way that the game still rewards the better player.
The bulk of the chapter examines two major issues of balance: fairness and diffi-
culty. The meaning of
fairness
differs between player-versus-player and player-
versus-environment games, and we'll address each separately. The question of
difficulty applies primarily to player-versus-environment games, and this chapter
will expand upon ideas in Chapter 9, “Gameplay,” explaining the various factors
that affect the player's perception of difficulty and how to manage those factors.
Next we'll look at the role of positive feedback in games: how to use it and how to
control it. Finally, we'll briefly investigate the problems of stagnation, trivialities,
and how to design your game in order to make the tuning stage of the process easier.
So divinely is the world organized that every one of us, in our place and time, is in balance
with everything else.
—J
OHANN
W
OLFGANG VON
G
OETHE
As with so many other game design concepts, the conventional notion of
balance
defies formalization. In the most general sense, a balanced game is fair to the player
(or players), is neither too easy nor too hard, and makes the skill of the player the
most important factor in determining his success. In practice, several different
game features combine to produce these qualities, and game balancing refers to
a collection of design and tuning processes that create those qualities in a game
under development.
The concept of balance differs considerably depending upon whether we speak of
games in which a player plays against one or more opponents (whether human
players or artificial opponents implemented by software) or of games in which a
player faces challenges posed by the game world, without an opponent. The first
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