During the iterative process, the aim is to balance the game out, so that it feels right for the majority of my audience meaning that the gameplay is not too easy, but then again not ridiculously difficult.
There are a couple of ways in which balance in games can be understood. There is balance in single player games, balance in multiplayer games, balance between strategies in games and balance between game objects.
I will focus on the ones that I can relate to with my prototypes, so balance in single player games, and balance between strategies.
Balance in single player games
From the Game Design Concepts blog, that I'm basing this entire post on, we can read that:
"In single-player games, we use “balance” to describe whether the challenge level is appropriate to the audience."
The reason why most games get harder as we beat more levels, is because our mastery level rises, and as we get better we want a bigger challenge. The change in difficulty over time in a single game is called pacing. Because my prototypes aim to be difficult to master from the start, I don't necessarily need to add pacing to increase the challenge, because mastering is the challenge itself.
I, being the creator of my games, find my prototypes relatively difficult. Every time I get asked by people what's my highest score however, they think I'm joking, or cheating because they are so high compared to what they achieved. It's a problem, because what I may find slightly challenging, can prove frustratingly difficult for my players, which can end up with their smartphone flying through the window or worse (well, for me, not for the smartphone) with them not wanting to play my game because it's too hard. Alternatively I can think that my game will be way too challenging, whereas proving too easy to my audience. This is why letting other people play my prototypes, and judging the game based on their feedback is so crucial, because it is them who are meant to be playing my game at the end of the day, not me.
The problem with playtesting is - everybody's skill is different, and where for one person the game proves too difficult to even get one point, for another getting a good score is a matter of a few tries.
The solution here is to get lots of playtesters (I get 20 which I think is a high enough number) to get a good idea of what the overall ranges are. Obviously these playtesters have to fall into the same demographic as who I'm aiming at with my prototypes, so that these ranges don't give me the wrong idea. This is why I always ask my playtesters whether they play twitch based mobile games.
No matter how much I'll try to balance my prototypes, it will be too easy for some, and too difficult for others. There's no way of making everybody happy so one trick I can do is to aim for the middle of the curve, as I will get the widest possible audience that way. I could also introduce difficulty levels to please even more people with different level of skill.
Balance between strategies
"Within a game, if there are multiple strategies or paths to victory that can be followed within the game, we use “balance” to describe whether following one strategy is better or worse than following another."
In Square Drop, there is no strategy involved. You tap when you have to tap and that is it. Things are more complex with Square Wobble. In Square Wobble players can decide to either move the square away from the incoming gap, to then squeeze it through by swiping at the right moment, or try to stay in front of the gap at all times, while controlling the trajectory of the square by quickly swiping left and right. One strategy does not have the advantage over the other.
That's good because there must not be a dominant strategy in my prototypes. The reason why is because "if the dominant strategy is discovered, astute players will ignore all suboptimal strategies. Everything in the game that is not part of the dominant strategy becomes extraneous noise."
Whereas it's ok having multiple strategies that are balanced out, as it encourages players to find the one they'll be mostly effective at, designing a game with one particularly powerful strategy makes all the other ones useless, giving players false decisions which wastes their time, making them feel deceived when they realise they've been playing my game the wrong way all that time.
When playtesting, I need to monitor what the player is exactly doing - what strategy is being used most often, which ones are performed least frequently and which ones give higher scores to make sure that there is no way of cheating.
Ways to balance games
So I've talked about discovering unbalanced mechanics, but how about fixing them? According to Game Design Concepts, in general there are three ways of balancing games:
- Maths - controlling the system through balancing in game variables
- Using my game designer instincts - changing the balance in the game until it feels right to me
- Playtesting - adjusting the game based on the results of playtests, where the players are experienced gamers who have been instructed to play to exploit and win
Either way providing I use one, two, or all three of these balancing techniques, I will be iterating my game in a more reliable way as opposed to just guessing and hoping for luck.
Additional advice worth mentioning:
- Keep the prototype easy to learn and difficult to master - at no point will I want my iteration to change this core idea, that I'm following through the entire dissertation
- Make one change at a time - if something breaks after making a change, I know exactly why. If something breaks after making ten changes, I won’t know which change (or combination of changes) caused it.
- Don't mistake a confusing mechanic with a bad mechaic - there is an entire article about the importance of not removing a mechanic that is just confusing for the player, and instead explaining how it works better either by text, or preferably - visually. This is because the confusing mechanic, can actually be the core reason why the game is fun in the first place, however because of lack of information, the players are left scratching their heads. If the mechanic is fully understood by players, and they still don't like it - then it should be removed.
Making Better Games Through Iteration [ONLINE] Available at: http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/132554/making_better_games_through_.php?print=1 [Accessed 26th February 2015]
When Design Iteration Goes Wrong [ONLINE] Available at: http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/PeterAngstadt/20150211/236158/When_Design_Iteration_Goes_Wrong.php [Accessed 26th February 2015]
Game Design Concepts [ONLINE] Available at: https://gamedesignconcepts.wordpress.com/2009/08/20/level-16-game-balance/ [Accessed 26th February 2015]
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