Game Design: Breaking the Seesaw

Time to enter the ring for another bout with balance. The last two posts have been about single player and multi-player balance respectively. This time, I'm going to try to look at a few different methods and approaches to balancing games. By changing the way you approach balancing, you change the way the game is played. Additionally, you oftentimes have to come to an accord with outside forces influencing your game.

To start off, lets talk about Super Smash Brothers: Brawl. Smash Bros is a fighting game that takes characters from a huge number of other games and throws them into the same arena. The characters were all balanced by the designers to the same approximate level, so that an unarmed character has equal chance against others who you laser guns or magic. The designers used the equal-but-different method, so some are faster, others slower, and while some are very defensive, others have little to no defense. However, despite the best efforts of the creators, some characters are more powerful than others.

There are of course, a variety of mods for SSB:B that attempt to balance the game. Brawl+ takes the basic game, and tweaks the abilities of the characters so that they are more balanced. They tweak numbers such as movement and attack speeds, damage, and how the physics effect the characters to make it so that the characters are closer to the same level of power. Brawl- on the other hand takes the basic game and feeds it lots of really weird drugs. The result is that all of the characters are ridiculously broken and over-powered, but because they're all so much stronger than the base level of characters, the game remains balanced (to a certain extent).

When you make the  game entities stronger, it makes the game progress faster, and thus favors those players who have better twitch based reflexes and better attentional capacity.If this is your intent, that is fantastic, but otherwise, be aware of what your changes might do to other aspects of the game.

Related to favoring players, a lot of the discussion about multi-player balance was based off the assumption that the players had equal skill. If they don't, and your game is balanced assuming they do, one player is going to be more likely to win and it will make the game less interesting for both, as part of the fun (in my opinion) is figuring out who is going to win. If you know from the outset which player will achieve victory, it is a less enjoyable experience (again, personal opinion).

To fix this, some designers add mechanics to account for a difference in skill. For example, in Go, the more inexperience player sometimes starts with pieces on the board, giving them a stronger starting position. The amount that the player is favored is determined by their win/loss record against that particular player. Other games will give a player more resources, more time to think, or help them with randomness inherent in the game (ie, using different dice).

What I hope you get out of this mini-series is that balance is a very complicated beast, especially for multi-player games, but also for single player. Figure out what you want the user experience to be, and aim for that. Test, modify and retest until you reach the level of balance you're looking for.