I’m coming to the release of a relatively large / medium sized game (12,000 lines of code).
The balancing and pacing of the game is a really important factor for the enjoyment and I was wandering is there a particular technique that big games use to balance their game, surely it’s not manual as it would take weeks to play through most of the game so how would they go about devising a “formula”? to calculate the values and prices of everything to be perfect?
Or do they just manually adjust everything using multiple game testers?
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We mainly did that in the alpha testing phase, where my testers suggested me changes about the balance. But it’s impossibly to balance everything perfectly in the very beginning, every game rebalances stuff after a while. The best advice I can give you is to put every multiplier in one module script, so you’ll be able to change everything easily whenever you want without rewriting hundreds of lines. Also try having as much multipliers as possible, so you will minimize the risk of having to implement them later on.
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Yeah I have game flow constants all in one module script. So I guess I just manually adjust it using testers?
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That and using players too. If you look at the big games, you’ll see that they adjust things all the time.
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Test, test, test. And once you think it’s balanced, test it again.
There’s (sadly) no magical formula to balance a game. You can definitely get most things right with experience, and critical thinking. But to be sure, you have to test it thoroughly.
Ideally have others test it too. It’s easy to get into a tunnel vision of how easy/hard something is when you’ve most likely done that thing hundreds of time while developing your game.
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