Game Balancing - Fundamentals of Game Design - page 358

feedback in the later stages of the game without giving the first player who gets into
the lead too much of an advantage in the early stages. Your proposed change must
be fair: You cannot flatly offer the player in the lead a special advantage. While
applying to all players, your rule change should be of the greatest benefit to the
player with the largest amount of money. Explain how your proposal would work.
(Hint: Your change may require a means of detecting that the game is in its later
stages in order to come into effect then or to have its greatest impact then. Think
about what is different between the early and later stages of the game and how a
rule change might take advantage of that difference.)
Design Practice QUESTIONS
1. Is your game a PvP game or a PvE game?
2. Are the relationships among the player's options in the game largely transitive,
intransitive, or a mixture of both?
3. If the relationships are transitive, how will you balance them so that each choice
remains viable? Do you employ direct costs, shadow costs, or both? What will these
costs be? How, if at all, will the player learn what they are? Or will the transitive
options simply be upgrades from one another with no need to be balanced?
4. If your game includes intransitive relationships, what will you do to make them
more interesting for the player and not too obvious?
5. Do you plan to give the player a choice of units to control or control over a vari-
ety of units? If so, how will you differentiate them? Will each unit have a unique
role to play, with qualities it shares with no other, or will the qualities of some
units overlap?
6. Does the game contain any elements that the player might perceive to be unfair?
7. If yours is a PvP game, are the capabilities of the forces symmetric or asymmet-
ric? If they are asymmetric, in what ways do they differ and how will they be
balanced? By adjusting costs? By changing rules or probabilities to compensate?
8. Do the game's challenges increase steadily in difficulty, or are there peaks and
troughs, or spikes, in the difficulty level? If so, where are they?
9. How do you plan to change the absolute difficulty of your challenges? Do you
plan to increase the power you provide to the player to meet the game's challenges?
Will the player's perception of the game's difficulty go up with time, or will it
remain relatively flat?
10. What mechanisms, if any, will there be for changing the game's difficulty level?
Hints? Shortcuts? A difficulty setting? How will the difficulty setting change the