In general, I try and keep concise and focused squarely on Haque’s development. If I’m not careful I can go off the rails and start making grand sweeping statements about game design at length… and that’s exactly what happened here.

So, fair warning: this is about the nebulous practice of balancing game mechanics and I only relate it to the game you might have backed at the very end.

This isn’t an essay on how to balance your game. This is like three mini-essays tangentially related by the theme of balance that are meant to illustrate that game balance is sort of complicated and strange and completely changes depending on what side of the player/designer glass you’re on but ultimately determines if players will like your game for more than five minutes.

There are pictures but they’re mostly from my notebooks.

There are a couple links too. Mostly videos!

Vocab

I’ll start by defining some terms up front because I’m gonna toss around some phrases that would probably make sense only to me.

These are my definitions for the purposes of this essay. Your definitions may vary. Apologies to game design students and “for realsies” game designers.

Game Balance is the idea that no one style of play is vastly more effective than all others. Preserving game balance means allowing experimentation and expression through a game’s mechanics and not merely supporting the “right” or dominant way to play.

Perfect Balance is the idea that all decisions are viable, all choices are meaningful, and the world is the player’s canvas. The mechanics of the game encourage all styles of play. All.

Incomparables are game mechanics that cannot be easily weighed against one another. The ability to go invisible is not always better than the ability to fly or the ability to breathe poison gas. One of these abilities cannot be easily compared to the other.

I like this word a lot, and I’m borrowing it from Extra Credits.

Statistics (stats) are scaling values that are tied to mechanics. Statistics exist in degrees of power and can change in scale from instance to instance but usually never change in execution. Stats are different from incomparables in that it’s pretty easy to weigh one against another.

Mathematical Balance

Balancing a game should be easy. Once you weigh the base stats against each other perfectly, you just throw on a bunch of incomparables and boom: instant genius balanced game. All the awards.

This is where I started when I went to balance my character stats and I quickly fell out of my depth. I was tweaking half-percentages of attack accuracy against nine-sided dice rolls and that’s not… great game design.

Even when I ran through my test dungeons, certain builds were still more viable than others. Straight accuracy wasn’t holding up, straight evasion builds would eventually get one-shotted, but straight defense or straight attack would make it through as fine as a character with even stat allocation would.

But all stats should have even effects right? All stats should be balanced.

It might surprise you to find that shooting for mathematically perfect stats actually doesn’t work out super great. For one, it’s impossible if the rules of your game always contain “Kill enemies to win” and “Don’t die to not lose” because then doing damage is always the best thing because that’s how you win.

Note: You don’t win by not losing.

A character with no attack power can’t win in that system without the game designer engineering an entire parallel game system to accommodate that playstyle and as a flesh-and blood game designer you do not have infinite time.

All playstyles are not valid. You have to teach your player the rules, they have to know the system they’re working in and use that system to their advantage.

Your job as a game designer is not to balance for a player that only wants to put points into accuracy. Your job is to make accuracy as a stat evocative for as many players as possible for good or ill.

Games have to have rules, games have to be released, game designers have to sleep.

Perfect balance is impossible and if it was possible it still wouldn’t be fun or interesting or meaningful.

Heck not even Pokemon has perfect balance. Look at this chart. That’s not a shape. But the irregularity of this chart contributes so much to the gameplay of Pokemon. If a few Poison and Normal and Grass types have to be underdogs in the high level competitive scene, then well, we’ll just have underdogs.

I think the real, true issue here is that we’re trying to solve problems before they start and so far in my experience balancing a game doesn’t really work like that.

The License to be Boring

To reference my earlier definition, the point of game balance is not to validate or accommodate every single style of play but to make sure that no one style of play becomes the only style of play.

Back in 2010, Anthony Burch made a video that I’ve thought about at least five times a week for six years. “The freedom to be boring” explains that in allowing players multiple paths to a solution of a problem, game designers sometimes include paths that, while logical and efficient in theory, aren’t super novel or fun in practice.

Therefore the job of a good designer is not to create the most amount of solutions, but to encourage the use of satisfying solutions.

Take this tweet that XCOM designer Jake Solomon made earlier today as a little case study.

A Youtuber going by the handle Beaglerush developed an ambush strategy in the XCOM 2 prerelease build that was so effective at wiping out enemies that sometimes they were dead before they could take their first turn. The “Beaglerush Maneuver” is creative, powerful, clever and even laudable. It twists the mechanics of XCOM 2 to totally benefit the player.

And it’s so effective, that once you know how to pull off the maneuver, you don’t need to change your strategy. You’ve got it figured out.

And that’s when the game stops being XCOM.

XCOM is about riding the line of success and failure. XCOM is about blundering into an ambush and somehow surviving by the skin of your teeth. XCOM is about going in with a plan and then altering the plan because you have to. That’s where XCOM shines.

Red Hook Studios spent a whole year of early access ironing out imbalances just like this in their fantastic Roguelike RPG, Darkest Dungeon. Not everyone was thrilled.

But doing the same overpowered tactic over and over again (and being rewarded for it) is boring.

The way in which you balance your game is a statement on how your game should be played.

Haque

I’m at that special time in my development cycle where I have to start nailing down what this game is going to be about. If I’m going to shepherd my players in a direction through the balance of my game, I’d like that direction to be towards improvisation.

I want to reward players who switch tactics mid fight because they know they can’t accomplish everything with one setup. I want players to feel scrappy and clever. I want players to take risks and then learn something about the deeper mechanics of Haque.

I’m still figuring this out but I think the path towards Haque’s growth lies in deemphasizing a player-character’s intrinsic stats and relegating most of the stat bonuses to swappable equipment. In Haque’s old rules, stats were determined by your attributes (intrinsic values) and equipment just sort of helped.

But balancing attribute growth and how big (or small) of a change a single attribute point represented was… exhausting. I couldn’t keep track of it all. And I knew with big enough numbers and enough time, the whole system would fall apart and someone would find the loophole to the always 100% effective build and then I’d be sad.

I ditched attributes. Attributes are out and now I’m sticking with chunkier stat increases through equipment. In Haque, unlike in say, Dark Souls, your stats don’t determine your equipment. Your equipment determines your stats.