Brand Game Development

JANUARY 13, 2020

You and all the other players in the game play as Spirits who fight off the Invaders – basically, people who want to colonize your island. Balanced asymmetry leads to greater variety. The trick, of course, is to make sure all varying powers are definitely distinct while remaining balanced. Lightning’s Swift Strike.

Game Design 130

Game Design Game Designer Games Balance 130

Radiator Blog

NOVEMBER 10, 2021

Perfect for pretending to have played Deathloop if you find yourself talking to a game dev. Not that you should ever talk to a game dev. This fighting game health mechanic is too fussy and unreliable for a busy shooter. I think the intention is to make you scrounge around for ammo during a fight and/or swap weapons more often.

Fighting 130

Fighting NPC Puzzle AI 130

Brand Game Development

JANUARY 21, 2019

Force players to balance tactics and strategy. Pandemic forces you to balance tactics and strategy. If you are constantly running around and fighting disease, especially if that entails direct or charter flights, it will be much harder to reach a research station and find a cure to each disease. Oh, and you will get punished.

Game Design 130

Game Design Game Designer Co-op Games 130

Brand Game Development

SEPTEMBER 16, 2019

Marquise de Cat rules the woodlands with an iron paw, forcing the woodland creatures to team up and fight back. Seem like a monster to balance? As you scroll, you notice people write reviews in a way that implies the balanced nature of the asymmetrical design is surprising. So what exactly is Root ? Really enjoyed.”

Game Design 130

Game Design Game Designer Games Balance 130

Brand Game Development

APRIL 21, 2017

Dev Diary posts are made to teach game development through specific examples from my latest project: Highways & Byways. With this mini-failure in mind as an example, what can game devs learn about spotting and dropping bad mechanics? It upset the whole drafting balance. Key Takeaways for Game Devs. Click here.

Mechanics 130

Mechanics Dev Game Developer Game Development 130

Ask a Game Dev

JULY 12, 2023

As you might expect, numerical balance values like 10% higher stun duration, 8% less HP, or an extra 5% critical hit rate are often built to be easy to change because we expect to have a lot of things in the game that can change them. Fighting games, for example, tend to make animation changes regularly because of the way they are built.

Animation 52

Animation Animation Balance Fighting 52

Brand Game Development

NOVEMBER 18, 2016

You play as members of the CDC fighting four pandemics, each of which are constantly threatening to wipe whole metropolitan areas off the map. There’s a lot of factors to balance, and communicating with your team for long enough to coordinate actions is critical. That alone is enough to make it special, but it’s no one-trick pony.

Fighting 130

Fighting Communications Balance Concepts 130

Brand Game Development

FEBRUARY 24, 2017

In it, you romp around an 8-bit world, fighting monsters and building anything your heart desires. I think there’s a few takeaways: To give people a sense of autonomy, balance your game to where multiple strategies are viable ways of winning. Minecraft and its unexpected rise were like something out of a movie.

Alpha 130

Alpha Sandbox Build Beta 130

Ask a Game Dev

OCTOBER 10, 2024

However, doing this for one to eight players (or, as it stands now in WoW anywhere from 10 to 30) means eight balancing passes for every encounter. while others like specific attacks and cooldowns often require more careful balancing. That's far too much work to do in any reasonable amount of time.

Fighting 52

Fighting NPC Balance Mechanics 52

Brand Game Development

NOVEMBER 20, 2017

Melee – a unique fighting game that got a new lease on life as people exploited glitches and created a new form of completion. In a game I co-designed with Matt Greenleaf, which is currently unpublished, I had come up with a mechanic that was whenever a player made a move, the game state would either go to imbalance or balance.

Mechanics 130

Mechanics Games Game Design Game Designer 130

Radiator Blog

MAY 5, 2021

WE SHOULD ALL DO THIS / STEAL THIS: Dev-owned wiki. The dev team "SureAI" operates the official Endreal strategy guide and lore wiki. It's not uncommon to walk between towns and fight like 6 different packs of wolves. this is better to sell" and this tips that balance too much toward the latter. Anyway, here's my notes.

Open World 130

Open World NPC Cutscenes Terrain 130

The Bottom Feeder

NOVEMBER 15, 2023

A few devs are still salty, but life appears to go on. “My Development Life Is Crap From Wall Too Wall, I Have No Time, and Now I Have To Look At Incomprehensible Corporate Balance Sheets Too?" Though reading all those devs tweeting that they were switching to Godot and tweeting 5 minutes later, "Oh no! Unity backs off.

Software 92

Software Engine Engineering Game Engine 92

Rindoku

OCTOBER 7, 2016

After months of toiling in a secluded attic, the last weeks of which were particularly grueling, we finally took Second Hand to its first public showings: first to Dev-Play in Bucharest and shortly thereafter to Clujotronic in our very own Cluj. It was scary, thrilling, amazing and… we won the Dev-Play Indie Pitch! Color me excited!

Point and Click 52

Point and Click Dev Demo Playtesting 52

Grid Sage Games

MARCH 10, 2022

Some roguelikes don’t strive for balance, but maintaining balance has always been important to me for Cogmind, since it fits better with my vision for this type of game, heavy on tough, complex, and consequential decision-making at multiple strategic and tactical levels. Alien Artifacts. Exiles Prototypes.

Balance 52

Balance Mechanics Beta Prototyping 52

Deconstructor of Fun

OCTOBER 10, 2021

Fighting Power Creep with Scarcity As the Lead Designer on Legendary: Game of Heroes , I invested a lot of time on our first few hundred heroes. As a Lead Designer for LEGENDARY I invested a lot of time on creating and balancing our first few hundred heroes. Fighting Purchase Regret with Ownership.

Asset 52

Asset Games Fighting Mobile 52

Tom Francis

NOVEMBER 9, 2022

All your good pieces are trapped behind a wall of bad pieces, so you both have to spend a bunch of turns moving the bad pieces out of the way so the good pieces can fight. The pawn is a shitshow of clumsy balance changes. The early game is slow and boring.

Concepts 100

Concepts Game Design Game Designer Tile 100

Deconstructor of Fun

APRIL 2, 2022

Mobile gaming megatrends Eric Seufert, Mobile Dev Memo. For example, keep it simple for an older player of a casual puzzle game versus a hardcore gamer who understands managing resources and more complex systems Game economists must be careful to balance monetization techniques without blocking the fun.

Mobile 52

Mobile Mobile Balance Mobile Gaming 52

Keith Burgun

JANUARY 27, 2023

I mean, you spend a LOT of time fighting in this game. One last thing about the combat: it is very poorly balanced. There’s several systems of collectible quest kind of things where you find an icon on the map, do a boring, easy fight, rinse and repeat. It’s a horrible items system and it drags everything down.

Writing 52

Writing Fantasy Fighting Cutscenes 52

Grid Sage Games

NOVEMBER 28, 2022

Being able to backtrack is generally going to be more realistic in the RPG sense--of course your character should be able to go back and pick up that item they left behind, or fight that enemy that scared you away before. In a game setting, though, this can be quite an annoyance from a design perspective (harder to balance!)

Point and Click 52

Point and Click Mechanics Feature Open World 52

Grid Sage Games

JULY 17, 2022

The above samples show encounters added to a variety of Garrison layouts, highlighted with a dev visualization overlay. Of course this change comes with significant balance repercussions, which we’ll cover when we get to discussing that topic further below. Garrison encounter distribution samples, color-coded by category.

Beta 52

Beta Content Balance Mechanics 52

Deconstructor of Fun

SEPTEMBER 19, 2022

And because of the RNG nature of puzzle games it's also why you don't see a lot of puzzle games with many content creators or dev videos. After a successful Boss fight, the player was shipped off to the next island. UA is probably one of the biggest drivers of puzzle games as puzzle games tend to be more PVE/single player experiences.

Puzzle 52

Puzzle Mechanics Content Dev 52

Brand Game Development

NOVEMBER 23, 2020

As you and your fellow monsters toss around the village king, you attract a steady buffet of adventurers who try – poorly – to put up a fight! No downtime, renewed fun in each game and perfect balance regardless of the number of players. You are a fantasy monster trying to sate your insatiable appetite.

Tile 130

Tile Games Point and Click Art 130

Deconstructor of Fun

FEBRUARY 12, 2024

This is a balance play to ensure players are completing the pass at a speed necessary to maximize player attention while reducing economic inflation from free pass rewards. While players are getting more quests more often, they are also seeing an increase in XP required to get to the next tier of the pass.

Mechanics 59

Mechanics Content Feature Mobile 59

Radiator Blog

DECEMBER 12, 2022

A homophobic English farmboy is forced to work with a hunky Romanian farmhand, and so inevitable muddy fight sex and simmering romance ensues. Balancing the weight of each system was difficult. When we idolize crisp clean superflat pixel art today, it's actually a new aesthetic invented by indie game devs from the late 2000s.

Pixel 130

Pixel Film Art Prototyping 130