I’ve been working on a Roblox project, and I’m currently at the stage where I want to focus on balancing the gameplay, ensuring it feels fair, engaging, and rewarding for players over time.
I’m not looking for feedback on a specific game idea right now, but rather general advice, frameworks, or resources about balancing games on Roblox (or even game design in general).
If you have any personal tips, techniques, or workflows for approaching balance, especially in areas like:
Balance toward what? Everything as-is can be considered “balanced,” the question is whether it aligns with your vision for the game. In gameplay testing, do players earn money quicker than you had envisioned? Is combat tougher than you envisioned? From here, tweak the game to your desired outcome. Gameplay testing, especially multiplayer, will be the most insightful. Make sure you get a diverse group of testers, some skilled and some not.
Exactly how @ZurichBT said it. Balancing isn’t a thing u just do and then get done with, it’s a long process that takes a lot of effort to get right. Make sure to collect as much feedback as u can from the players (they won’t go out of their way to tell u anything most of the time, u will have to take the initiative.)
The thing I struggle the most with is setting the “initial values” and then tweaking the necessary stuff in case the game has a lot of parameters to tweak, things like multipliers, pet bonuses.
How can I balance every parameter to make the perfect balance (of course, it depends on my perspective of perfect balance, but let’s say I have a goal of time to beat each level, how can I balance so many parameters?)
Guess, then playtest. Better to start somewhere than be stuck in the planning phase for all of eternity. Also, you just need to perfect the most impactful parameters. If pet bonuses are only going to speed up things by as much as 10%, then it’s fine to be a little off with tweaking pet bonuses.
You can’t balance much until you have a playable prototype. You can anticipate a starting point for parameters based on ideas of how your players will behave, but there will definitely be oversights.
When it comes to deciding on starting parameters for levels, multipliers etc. it’s a good practice to use spreadsheet software (ie Excel) to visualise how these parameters will scale, and what sort of timescales it takes to reach them.
In example, a simple XP/Level graph would have one column for Level, and the column beside it would automatically work out the XP based on a formula of your choice. Then, you may consider on average how quickly a player may gain XP from the standard gameplay loop in your game. (This rate will probably increase as you progress in your game depending on how you want to design it - in which case you could implement this in the graph too.)
Then you’d try to design your game prototype’s loop around this metric, for example 5 minutes per level up. When you test your game and notice that you are falling short/overshooting this metric, that’s when you go back and adjust numbers.