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Young Game Designer 2 Course: Balancing Progression and Dynamics Without Mathematics





The previous article about the balance of characters and equipment gathered a lot of feedback and I decided not to delay with the sequel.



Then we dismantled the very basis - how to calculate the abstract force of the essence and how this force changes in the course of its life. Today we will increase the scale and see how the balance depends not on specific situations, but on the fundamental rules or the dynamics of the game.

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Bonus at the end - a few links on the topic.



Balance, economy and progression



Let's continue the theme of RPG and swords (I still recommend starting with the last article , if you don't know what I mean). For example, in Diablo, a player knocks gold out of barrels in order to later buy a new, cooler sword on it.



How much should an ordinary sword with a unit of damage cost? I do not know, think up, it is not so important. I will take 10 gold for a sword with 1 damage. The main question is how much will a sword with 2 damage cost then? Probably 20 gold? And with 5 damage? Obviously 50.



Yes and no. At first you could ask yourself: what are the rules of our game, how does it work? Depending on the mechanic, a sword with 5 damage can cost 50 and 150 gold.



Imagine that all enemies have 5 life units. For the player, this means that with a sword, which has 1 damage, it will need 5 attacks to kill the enemy. If a sword with 2 damage - 3 attacks, with 3 or 4 damage - 2 attacks. And one sword attack with 5 damage.







And it is very important - the less the enemy's lifetime, the less damage he will be able to inflict.



It turns out that by buying a sword with great damage, you not only have this power at your disposal, but also save HP. This means that in such a game, each next unit of damage is more valuable than the previous one, as much as HP allows you to save.



As a result, we obtain a certain cost curve:





At this point, you need to think again about the mechanics. How fast do enemies cause player damage?



Here the player bought a sword with 5 damage, and every enemy dies with one attack. Suppose we have a real-time RPG and very few enemies on the screen - they approach the player one by one, and die before they can do damage. In such a game, a sword with 5 damage will make the player virtually immortal. It will not be fun, but such a sword is too strong to exist at all. But what if at each time point there are 100 enemies on the screen, and even if a player kills each with one blow, he will not physically be able to dodge the others? Then the sword will be good, and it will not spoil the pleasure of the game (if it was originally).



Maybe we want our RPG to work differently. To increase the number of enemies with HP levels. Then, increasing the damage of the sword, the player will not become stronger than the enemies, he will only remain at their level. And then you can leave a value of 10 gold for each unit of damage, as we originally intended.



At this point, it is worth talking about that with each level a player could earn more gold per hour than at the previous level. This is necessary for feeling the growth of the player’s strength and feeling that he has become more effective and better. Then the rise in prices in the game will be due not so much to a balanced necessity, as to simple inflation. But building an interesting progression of player growth is a separate big conversation, more details about progressions can be read here .



As always, the main question in the balance was not “how to count,” but “how the game works.”



An example from practice. In the shooters, weapons usually have ammunition - the number of shots that can be made before the need to recharge. In most classic shooters like Call of Duty, large ammo is an advantage. The more shots you have, the lower the accuracy requirements of the player, the more chances to kill the target, the more enemies you can kill for the store. In War Robots and other shooters, where one store is almost never enough to kill a target, a long time to defuse the store ceases to be an advantage. Because while you shoot at your opponent, he shoots back and you lose HP. The advantage of having a single-shot gun in the store - of which you can instantly do damage and hide during reload from return fire.



Therefore, there are no universal solutions and "rules of calculation". Depending on the dynamics of the game, its speed, control circuit - the same parameter in terms of functionality can have a completely opposite effect on the balance.


And in each new project the balancer needs to derive these rules anew, taking into account the particular game features.



Price of opportunity



At this point, we have already observed several times that the main thing in the balance sheet is how the game is played, sorry for the tautology.



Many are familiar with collectible card games (CCI) - Hearthstone or Magic: The Gathering. They have creatures with a certain power, which is considered as:



(damage + HP) * 100%



This is slightly different from what I said in the first article due to the peculiarities of the CCR mechanics (just believe that this is so). Inside the match, creatures are “bought” for mana and, after spending some time, we can calculate how to set the price:





Is this enough to charge an adequate price?



After a few tests, you will understand that no. If you assign them a price, based only on combat parameters, then the more expensive creatures you use, the less often you will win. More expensive creatures will be too weak for their price, it will be more profitable to call on many small cards. All because, "buying" creatures, you spend not only mana, but also opportunities. And opportunities also have a price.



Suppose you have 10 mana. And for 10 mana you called a huge creature - Colossus - which has 15 damage and 15 lives. He will kill any enemy with one blow, and no one can kill him alone. Having spent all your mana per turn, you lose the opportunity to summon anyone else or use a spell. You will also have just one creature that is vulnerable to instant death spells. In this case, a single card with a spell (which is probably cheaper than the Colossus) in the opponent’s hand can only be your entire combat power.



In addition, if the enemy attacks with several creatures, then your Colossus will be able to block only one of them (if it is MtG) or no one at all (Hearthstone).





Blocking damage in MtG



Calling Colossus, you lose the ability to use other cards and the ability to effectively block. To compensate for this, the characteristics of the Colossus must be even higher than what we would have counted with the help of pure mathematics. After all, it is necessary to compensate not only spent mana, but also all lost opportunities, as well as additional risks.



On the other hand, if you have some kind of authoring mechanics, one creature will be able to block an entire army of the enemy, and there are no instant death cards or counterspells in the game - then the cost of opportunity will not be as high as in MtG or Hearthstone. It all depends on the fundamental rules of the game and a set of specific features.



The price of opportunity can be found everywhere. For example, in shooters sniper sights give a good increase, but reduce visibility. This is a missed opportunity, which you are paying for the power of sight.







And again I repeat - the key to the right balance is not in mathematics, but in the rules of the game.



Game dynamics balance



Before that, we were talking only about static parameters - the unit has some damage and a lifetime that simply exist. Real games are constantly changing in dynamics.



Parties have a beginning, middle and end. Someone is focusing on a quick victory, and someone on long-term development. All this is work with dynamics and it also needs to be balanced. For this there are feedback chains.



When we talked about the price of swords, we established the relationship of some properties with others. For example, 1 damage is 10 gold. Damage and gold are properties. The ratio of 1 damage to 10 gold is the rule. The more property "damage", the more property "gold".







We also saw that the damage property can affect not only the gold property, but also the ratio (the rule itself).







Recall the sword, in which the cost of each of the next damage grew. A sword with 1 damage cost 10, a sword with 2 damage already 30 (10 + 20 gold for an additional unit), a sword with 3 damage - 60 gold (30 + 30 gold for an additional unit) and so on.



When a property in a game affects a rule, it is called a feedback loop. Feedback circuits describe the dynamics of the game. There are two types of them:



  1. Positive feedback chains.
  2. Negative feedback chains.


Positive feedback is needed to “overclock” the game. Negative - to “slow down”, stabilize.



An example of negative feedback is easy to find in MOBA games. For example, you have a very good match and you kill the same opponent over and over again. And with each new death, he gives you less and less gold. Reducing rewards is a chain of negative feedback. It does not allow you to earn too much gold on a weak enemy and break away from it too far.







An example of a positive feedback circuit is taken from Starcraft. There you mine minerals, for which you can build more workers, to mine more minerals, to build more workers, so ... and so on.







In this example, the amount of minerals does not directly affect the rule, but affects the property, which in turn strengthens the rule. More minerals per second = more workers produced per second.



By the way, there is also a price opportunity here - Starcraft has a limit of 200 unit points. And each built worker will take away the points of the available limit, reducing the maximum size of your army.



Thus, feedback circuits allow you to describe the dynamics of how the game will develop and adjust its course.







In the chains of positive communication, a player who has gained a slight advantage will only increase it over time. In the chains of negative communication, a lagging player will pull up to the leader, and the leader will not be allowed to take off too far.



Example. In classic sports games, feedback circuits are usually absent. In football and similar games, the “complexity” of a match is not regulated at all. If one team is stronger, then it will consistently save the whole match at approximately the same speed.



Let's put in there a positive feedback: for each goal in the opponents' goal let the scoring team bring an additional player to the field. Then the numerical advantage will allow them to score goals even faster, to bring even more new players to the field, to score even more often. At some point, the lagging team will not have a single chance.



And now let's try with negative feedback: for each point of advantage, the leading team must remove one player from the field. In this case, the winning team will be harder to attack as well as defend. A lagging team is more likely to equalize the score. Such a "negative" football will be the maximum to delay and maintain tension for a long time.



You can choose between which elements to build these connections, change their strength or character. In the example of football, you can change the number of players not for every point, but for every 2 or 5 goals. Or tie it not to the score, but to the time that the team is leading. Or to change not the number of players on the field, but the rules of scoring - two points per goal for a lagging team. Each of these changes will have its consequences. For example, a bonus for points advantage will make a very tense game for every even point, which is not achieved by building a rule around one or five points. This will allow you to fine-tune the dynamics and indirectly direct the course of the whole game, to help it develop as you have in mind. Even if it is a multiplayer game, in which you (as a designer) have no direct influence.



The balance is needed not only for combat units or equipment, but also for the rules of the game that affect dynamics and tensions. Even when you have a lot of diverse and balanced content, it is the dynamics that distinguish an intense and interesting game from a boring and lengthy one.


Conclusion and links



To be a good balancer, first of all you need to be a good game designer, not a mathematician - you figure it out. For two articles, we only needed a formula for calculating the area of ​​rectangles (in real work, a little more will be useful, but not too much).



Considering the examples, we did not think how to calculate that unit A was as strong as unit B. We disassembled the game into components, got into the design of missions, progression, economics, dynamics, rules of the game and sensations. And this is a universal examination, not tied to specific genres or mechanics. It does not depend on the realities of the market and its trends.



If it became interesting to you and you would like to understand these topics in more detail, then I advise you to start here:



Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/460359/

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