balancing a little earlier, before every last element of the game is in place, may be nec-
essary to make sure you do not run out of time.
The time at which the game is largely complete and true balancing becomes possi-
ble usually coincides with the time when the game is in full-on testing. This works out
for the best, since balancing and testing are closely intertwined activities. Balancing
often involves changing some settings in the game and then playing it to see if those
changes create the amount of challenge you are interested in. For each pass on the bal-
ancing, both you and the playtesters should try to play the game. Then the testers can
give you feedback about just how effective your efforts to balance the game have been
and, combined with your own analysis of the game’s condition, you can make more
changes and iterate through the process again. People who can successfully balance a
game by themselves, without the input of other playtesters, are rare. Often designers
who attempt to balance a game by themselves succeed in balancing the game only for
themselves, usually resulting in the game being too hard.
The best way to balance the game is to break down different systems into groups of
numbers that can be easily adjusted and tweaked. For instance, suppose you were mak-
ing a melee combat action game of some sort. If the players use a baseball bat in the
game, that bat will have a number of different attributes associated with it, such as how
much damage it does, how fast it attacks, how many times it can be used before it
breaks, how much it costs to buy, how many hands are required to hold it, and so forth.
Similarly, one can also break down enemy, player, and other system attributes into col-
lections of numbers that can then be adjusted to vary the usefulness or challenge of that
object. It is these values that you will continually adjust and massage in order to achieve
the balance you are seeking. This of course assumes that at a basic level your game is
already fun, with a sufficient variety of challenging encounters. If you wait until too late
to get the game fun at a basic level, it may become too risky to make the changes
necessary.
494 Chapter 25: Playtesting
Balancing inThe
Sufferingtook
place very late in
development.