Week 10

This last week, we looked at balancing of a game. In class, we started practicing this by looking at the game of “BattleBattle!”. One thing I noticed with this game is that some cards are easily over-powered when in the correct situation. At the same time, those same cards would be under-powered in certain matchups. I also noticed this when we were tasked with creating our own cards. When I played my created cards with the Vanilla card, they seemed to be fairly balanced. However, when I got to playing against my classmates, many of them had cards that easily beat the ones I had made. This made me feel like what Jesse Schell talks about.

“Players want to feel that the forces working against them do not have an advantage that will make them impossible to defeat.” (Schell, Ch 13)

When I lost against the vanilla card, I still felt like the tables could turn, that I could still get better roles and that if I had just been more lucky, I could have won. However, I rarely felt this way against some of my classmates. This made me really understand the importance of balancing one thing against everything else as most games I play are already well-balanced and just require player skill for you to do better. This also helped me understand why many online games have constant updates and are rarely ever just released finished. One other aspect that was in the readings that I saw in the creation of BattleBattle! cards was the risk-reward talked about by Zach Hiwiller.

“A player taking route B is taking a huge risk by taking on the difficult jumps, but the reward is being able to bypass a large section of the level. Many risk–reward scenarios take the form of time-shifting: turning short-term risk into the potential for long-term gain versus short-term certainty for short-term gain.” (Hiwiller, Ch 10)

When designing a card, I came up with the card “Fortune Teller”. This card had the ability to use a token to see the opponent’s next roll and then chose if they wanted to roll against it or skip that turn. The risk in this is that the fortune teller has no ways to regain tokens, however if the opponent was to roll a 6, the reward for doing this was great, as you could just opt out of playing against it and have the both of you go to the next round. One issue I saw with this card is that I made it to where the player had no meaningful choice in what to do. Every time, I found myself waiting until I had 1 health point left and then using all my tokens in succession. This ended up being what Schell describes as the dominate strategy.

“Once a dominant strategy is discovered, the game is no longer fun, because the puzzle of the game has been solved—there are no more choices to make.” (Schell, Ch 13)

A big issue with the card I had made was this. I had no reason not to just wait until I got to the end of the line. At one hp, I would then just use all tokens in the hopes that I will either be able to completely beat my opponent or just prolong my death. The card was not fun to play at that point.