The Art of Balancing… or How to Tear Your Hair Out

My respect for tight rope walkers and the guys who worked on Starcraft has gone up a hundred fold in the past week. You see I got lumbered with the job of balancing up Zogma and quite frankly it’s a nightmare. Not a full blown “my undead neighbour is trying to eat me” type nightmare, but a nightmare nonetheless.

The thing with a game like Zogma is that balance is completely vital if the game is to be fun. While in a well made shooter or RPG a slight imbalance might be forgivable – in Zogma if the balance is out, the game just won’t work.

The balance will really make or break the game. Too easy and the player will give up in boredom, too hard and the game will get chucked away in anger. So I’m painfully aware of how hard I need to work to get it right.

Walking the line:

What has really surprised me is the effect the smallest change to a variable can have, often wrecking an entire build. It’s really butterflies flapping in their wings in South America type stuff. For instance I just slowed the firing rate of the assault rifle by about ¼ of a second, to make the first 3 mins of the game a bit trickier. It fixed the start and I really thought I had got it, until I realised I had made the game impossible from about the 6 minute mark. Cue swearing and a strong whiskey with, a whiskey chaser.

The most heartbreaking one was yesterday. I thought I had finally hit El Dorado, a perfect working build. Everything seemed to be working perfectly. Then I gave the game to my girlfriend to have a test. The first thing she did was to arm all her survivors with shotguns. I was nervous by now; I had been testing for so long I had somehow forgotten to check how an all shotgun setup worked. Surely it wouldn’t be overpowered though, would it?

It was… all shotguns meant no zombie ever got within 20 yards of the house. I should have guessed, everyone knows shotguns to Zombies are like stakes to Vamps. Resisting the temptation to take my i-phone back and, off a short Keith Miller style run-up smash it against the wall….I thanked her and got back to work.

I still haven’t hit that build yet, but I haven’t given up either

Thursday, October 29th, 2009