Author: Sephis (Nick Giudici)

Sephis is the lead developer for the new browser based, asynchronous, strategy game, Jenny Ruined the World

One of the first abilities I designed for Jenny Ruined the World was Shield. It has also been the most frequently revised and difficult mechanics to get right. I’m not even sure we’re there yet, but we need to have a defensive ability besides just increasing a troop’s defense stat.

The Initial Design – The Anti Swarm

While JRtW was still in paper prototype the goal of Shield was to counter large numbers of small troops. This was a major concern because this was before we had a cap to the number of troops a single player could have in a space. The first iteration was like: Shield X – Reduce all damage by X that this troop takes. For example, Shield 2 would reduce the damage of a 5 power troop by 3 but it would reduce the damage of a 2 power troop by 0! Also, once you stacked shield to like 5 or higher the troop became nearly impossible to kill. You HAD to take them down in one giant attack. This was a very hard counter to small troops.

I hate hard counters. They eliminate all room for counter play. If you soft counter me I might be able to outplay you and win. But if you hard counter me I have no hope for winning. To me, this is the one reason I enjoy league of legends more than I enjoyed DOTA 2. Getting lane countered in DOTA meant a really, really boring 15 minutes.

The First Rework – The Range Killer

Shield was an issue but I didn’t have a better option immediately available. So I tried changing it to counter the current OP dev builds. At that time the meta was super high power, super high range troops. I’m talking a 10 power, 2 defense, 3 range BEAST. Direct damage countered the hell out of those guys but there was/is nothing stopping you from running both. In fact, those were the best decks at the time, range/burn decks.

I tried to reposition Shield to be a counter to both range and burn. So what we did was increase shield values but make them only apply to ranged attacks and burn. This was a big improvement but still not great. That broke up the meta and gave us other cards a chance to shine. However, range became too binary: it either rocked or the enemy had enough shield that it sucked. When you have no in between that’s a red flag that there’s an issue. Once again, I had a hard counter.

Take 3 – The Rube Goldberg Machine

So I tried putting a weak point in Shield for range to exploit. The weak point was if a ranged troop attack/counters in melee range it bypasses Shield. The whole reason range is powerful is that it lets you pick an enemy off without them countering. So now your ranged troops weren’t useless against high shield troops, they just had to get up close and personal.

But now this whole mess was just too damn complex. I had to explain it multiple times to people and they still didn’t exploit it. Also, it wasn’t a big enough weakness. Great, it was now both too complex and not effective enough. I just turned a super hard counter with 0 counter play into a hard counter with very little counter play.

Final Cut – Fixing the Real Issues

We finally realized that the root cause of why Shield was so broken is that it stacked too well. It accidentally was using increasing returns ( or a positive feedback loop). This either meant it was too weak in small doses or too powerful when stacked. So in any of the previous incarnations once stacked it entirely shutdown a large subclass of troop.

Once we came to terms with the actual issue instead of the symptom of the problem (#2) we were able to come up with better ideas. What if shield just couldn’t reduce damage to 0? So on any attack, at least 1 damage always got through. Then we could apply this to the original, simple design and come up with the (hopefully final design): Shield X – Reduces all incoming damage by X to a minimum of 1.

This would give us an organic method of achieving reduced returns. If my troops has shield 6 and your troop has power 2 then 5 points of my shield are wasted. This also means that high shield, low defense troops are still very easy to kill so your best bet is to balance shield and defense to make someone really hard to kill. So now my defense 2 shield 5 troop could be killed by any two enemy troops, even two 1/1 wusses.

Lessons Learned

In real game design it can be really hard to spot what the root cause of an issue is. Even if you’ve spent a lot of time studying other game systems, reading design books, and watching extra credits you can still fall into traps you’ve been repeatedly warned about.

You frequently have to rely on noticing during play testing that a few particular games were just not fun and really dig into why, not just leave well enough alone.

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