Homework 9: Balance

The first type of balance that the author described is fairness.  Is the game fair?  Does the computer have an unfair advantage against the player and if so, is this the intention of the game designer.  In symmetrical games, all players (and computers) in the game are given the same skills and tools to work with.  Our game is an asymmetric game.  While the mysterious fog seemingly has no health meter like our character, the creatures that attack our character will be “endlessly” coming from the smoke, and the  characters visibility will be shoddy.  This is intentional so as to promote the genre of the game (horror) but will need to be balanced appropriately so that the game isn’t too difficult.

The next type of balance is “Challenge vs. Success”.  the author provides an interesting chart (Fig. 11.2) which essentially describes that if a player’s skill is too low and the difficulty of a game is too high, then anxiety results.  However, if a player’s skill is too high compared to a game’s low difficulty, then boredom results.  In our game, as is one of the suggestions by the author, we may have an option for the player to change the difficulty.  A higher difficulty may result in more frequent enemies, faster health meter deterioration, and/or fewer items to restore health.

The third type of balance is “meaningful choices”.  This is the process of designing your game so that the player feels that the choices they make produce significant changes in the game.  Doing so makes your game feel less like a  single track story and more like a customizable experience.  In our game, the character can pick up new weapons.  Some weapons may have greater reach than others (and thus can defend our character more easily) but will be heavier and thus slower to swing.  The player must choose between fast-moving close-range weapons and slow-moving longer-range weapons.   Other choices that player may be able to make could include choosing which direction to explore, whether to head towards goals or explore the map to find items and story elements.

Balance element #4 is “skill vs. chance”.    Some players prefer to play games games based on skill (especially if they possess the particular skills necessary in the game) because it gives them a greater feeling of control over whether to not they win.  Games based on chance tend to be more relaxed since the odds of winning are generally predefined.  Out game will likely combine the two.  The player will have to execute time-management skills but the layout of the map will have some function of chance.

In the “Head vs. Hand” element, a game is examined to determine a balance of required dexterity and mental work (problem solving, puzzles, etc…).  Our game will be a mix of both.  The player will have to navigate the map. find items and defend against enemies (hand) but will also have to keep track of time, solve simple puzzles and find story elements (head).

The sixth balance type is “Competition vs. Cooperation”.  This is seemingly self explanatory.  However, the book does not delve into the possibility of its implication in single player games like ours.  Since there is no second player option, our games does not include the cooperativity element (unless, of course, you’re playing with a friend and switching off).  IN terms of competitions, you might compete with a friend by trying to complete the game in the fastest time, or by finding all the story elements.

Balance type #7 deals with how long the game is.  If the game is too short, the player doesn’t feel satisfied with the experience of the game but if the game is too long, the player can get bored or frustrated by the time commitment.  I feel that this will be the biggest challenge in creating our game.  Since class only lasts 1 semester, we can only reasonably make the game so long but we must try to make the game feel like it is complete.  The player should feel like they completed something and any feelings of wanting more should come from the desire for a sequel.

Balance elements #8 and #9 “Reward” and “Punishment” are interesting in the way that they bring a good deal of player psychology into the game balancing process.  It is generally seen that the potential for rewards are more motivating than the threat of punishment.  Rewards for our game can be new weapons, story elements, an increased “health bar” or even simply the satisfaction of seeing the town being a little more rebuilt after each level.  Punishments can include losing weapons and “health”, less visibility of surroundings, creepy music and sound effects, and “dying”.  Measure will have to be put in place to ensure that the weight of the punishments do not deter the player too much as to make the gameplay not fun.

The next balance element, “Freedom vs. Controlled Experience” is the balance between allowing the player complete interactivity and providing a desired experience directly to the player regardless of what they would choose to do personally.  Complete interactivity in a video game would seem impossible and I feel that our game follows the path of most video games in giving the player a particular degree of interactivity, allowing them to move around predefined boundaries of a scene or map and giving the character a small set of actions which they can perform.  The player must act with the same motivation as the character of the game (the player can’t decide that it likes the chaos and start throwing the townspeople back into the fog).  

The penultimate balance item is “Simple vs. Complex”.  Simple games are viewed as boring and, certainly, if you make a game where you hold the right arrow to move a square from the left side of the screen to the right, with no obstacles or other actions then ‘simple’ probably equates to boring.  However a simple design need not necessarily lead to a simple game. If in the same game you add the ability to move left and jump, and added some enemies that would end the game if they run into the square then you still have simple design but now your game is a little complex.  A game that is innately complex has a set of complex rules.  Dungeons and Dragons is an example of such a games where the rules are very complex.  Emergent complexity occurs when games have simple rules that can result in situations of great complexity.  In our game, some innate complexity may be observed in cost/benefit decisions made by the player while managing the time until the fog consumes the player.  The player may decide to head directly towards the next level or explore the map.  If the player heads straight to the next level, the miss out on finding new weapons that might help them in the future or story elements but if the player decides to explore they risk losing too much “health” and not being able to find “health” restoring items in time to prevent losing the game.
Finally, the last balance type is “Detail vs. Imagination”.  The author explains that in order to decrease the amount of work you have to do and to make your game less computationally heavy, you must strike a balance between the things you choose to create in detail for the player and the things you choose to leave to the imagination of the player.   Leaving details to the imagination of the player can create a better game because the player can often achieve a greater level of detail in their imagination than you would be able to create in a reasonable amount of time.  One thing we are going to do in this respect is to only create a “shell” of dense fog around our character with the assumption that the player will imagine that this fog actually extends far beyond the character in all directions, thus saving us the pain of having to render fog on a large map.