Hello Everyone!
I’m in a pickle with my current project. I’ve been making simulators for about a year now and all of them have either made a lot of money and had too many bugs to continue, or some bugs, no money and really unbalance. So, my question to all of you is how do I balance my game. Like a baseline balance before I play test it and adjust from there. Is there an equation? (I’ve heard of one before). What’s the secret to getting a really balanced game? Thanks!
It’s not really clear what you mean by “balance” in your question. “Balance” in the traditional sense of gameplay balance, or “balance” as in game maintenance?
If you mean gameplay balance: There aren’t necessarily just equations that you could optimize to get a balanced game (wouldn’t that be great, though?). You mainly need personal experience and intuition to extrapolate what your game’s balance will feel like, prior to testing. This can help point you towards the right direction when starting, but isn’t the best way to balance your game. Ultimately, the best way to test for balance is to constantly playtest every few iterations of your game and to watch players play and get feedback for them. The “secret” to getting good game balance is training your intuition with experience, and then constantly playtesting with every few iterations of your game.
If you’re talking about “balance” in terms of maintaining your project structures: Try to research ways on how to keep your games/projects/codebases organized and modular in a way that would be easy to debug from. A lot of these kinds of “unfixable bugs” are due to codebases not being organized/documented neatly.
Hope either of those explanations help!
I was talking in the sense of balancing item stats. Like tools that are purchased to increase the speed of progressing through the game.