Tag Archives: game balancing

How to do perfect (or almost) gameplay balancing

If you check at the bottom of this post you’ll see a sort of spreadsheet page (and indeed, it is!) and you’ll wonder what the … is that.

It’s my system to do perfect gameplay balancing! In games like RPGs, where you have lots of skills/stats, is really hard to balance properly games. There will always be some classes/races with better attributes than others. This is inevitable, but there are some tricks you can use to at least try to make a balanced game.

In what consists my method? simple, I take a spreadsheet program (Openoffice in my case) and I lay down the stats needed in row/columns like in the example below. Then, I use the SUM function to sum all values in rows/columns. The result should be that all totals are equals: it means that if I have a class with more Willpower, there will be another with more Wisdom, and so on. But in the end if you sum all values they should be all equals, grouped by your RPG system (in my case races/elements).

Hope I managed to express myself well. If you’re making a complex game, just try it, might save you some time! Of course there are still lots of things to balance inside the game itself but this should be a good start.
balancing

Supernova 2: unit balacing

Ok now that the battle is working completely, I have to start doing a simple process, but long: assigning all the units statistics, weapons, armor, devices and so on. Simple because I’m only editing a spreadsheet, not writing complex C/C++ code (I’ll then import the values inside the game at runtime). Long, because even if I plan everything “on paper”, of course when I test the data inside the game itself I always find that one side is more powerful than the other 🙂

I’m going to put emphasys on the fact that the Red Legion is more aggressive, has more damaging weapon and stronger armor, while on the other side, the Blue Army has more range of view / fire, faster and maneuvrable ships.

Some games solve the problem by having almost identical units from each side, but I think that while this ensure balancing, since in my game there isn’t going to be multiplayer, is better to have 2 very different playing styles based on which faction you choose 😉

Here I go, more time on my game spreadsheet…