Your perfect game balancing toolset.
TLDR: If you had a toolset that could help you with pacing, dynamic balancing, flow, etc. What should and shouldn’t it automate? Where would you want control?
There is a lot of cool research trying to gauge and maintain “fun” using fancy predictive algorithms, but from the limited amount I’ve seen it seems in practice developers mostly stick to static or player-controlled difficulty.
Some problems I’ve heard or seen:
• Shipping is hard, the current system works.
• Tweaking of a dynamic balancing system can be more time consuming than the tweaking of the balance.
• Designers don’t want to lose control of their balance to the whims of a black box.
• These systems can rob an underperforming player of a means to improve as the challenge progressively disappears.
• Researchers often make terrible demo games; with little design besides the dynamic difficulty tech. This affects the perceived usefulness of these techniques.
I feel like allot of it comes down to providing sufficient control over the cause and effect. But I really don’t know how this would go down in practice.
What would you need to see in a game balancing middleware for you to use it in your own development?
Full disclosure: I am actually making this thing. So I guess this is market research. I would love your opinion, though. Even if you think it's stupid.
There is a lot of cool research trying to gauge and maintain “fun” using fancy predictive algorithms, but from the limited amount I’ve seen it seems in practice developers mostly stick to static or player-controlled difficulty.
Some problems I’ve heard or seen:
• Shipping is hard, the current system works.
• Tweaking of a dynamic balancing system can be more time consuming than the tweaking of the balance.
• Designers don’t want to lose control of their balance to the whims of a black box.
• These systems can rob an underperforming player of a means to improve as the challenge progressively disappears.
• Researchers often make terrible demo games; with little design besides the dynamic difficulty tech. This affects the perceived usefulness of these techniques.
I feel like allot of it comes down to providing sufficient control over the cause and effect. But I really don’t know how this would go down in practice.
What would you need to see in a game balancing middleware for you to use it in your own development?
Full disclosure: I am actually making this thing. So I guess this is market research. I would love your opinion, though. Even if you think it's stupid.