Homework #9 "Balance"

               

              Homework #9 "Balance"

               Balancing in gaming of all sorts is an often overlooked  and underutilized aspect that can make or break the game.  You want to have a nice balance of difficulty, entertainment, reward, fairness between players and a game that does not have any outstanding feature that disrupts equal play in the game.  Balance is so important that by shifting the systems of balance inside a game, you can completely change the feel of the game and use the knowledge of balance to enhance your game and make it function better, enhance entertainment experience of players, and simply just solidify your game as a legitament game that is to be taken seriously.

                Balance in the book when looked over at a glance may potentially be summed up as a vague set of fairness.  And to a certain extent, that is exactly what it is.  But perhaps a better way to look at balance in any game is to recognize that there are many different types of balance in many different games, but what gives off the illusion of “vagueness” in balance is actually the pervasive nature of balance itself as a defining aspect of the game.  It is simply intertwined within the game itself, it is arguably the most defining aspect of the game, even over art, technology, game story and game concept.  An unbalanced game with leave players feeling frustrated and disappointed, with little to no chance that they will play the game again.

                Balance is the flavor of your game.  Balance is the part of the game that will influence whether or not players continue to play your game and what ways they choose to play your game.  It is my personal opinion that everyone in their individual minds understands the fundamentals of fairness, no matter how diverse or similar.  It’s a concept that is learned throughout life at a very early age and continuously brought up at every other stage in your life.  People know what fair is, they know logically why things are fair or unfair and moreover they can feel it on an emotional level.  It is from this emotional level that you see the experience of the game affect the person.  It is from this emotional level that you can see the benefits and wonders of virtual reality, mixed with technology, art and design to create a truly unique experience within a video game, existing within the mind of the controller.

                An example of this fairness could be shown in a game like chess.  Though not completely fair, both players do have all of the same pieces, all of the same movements, and have to take turns moving there pieces one at a time.  It is true that one player moves first, but this is a smaller aspect of the game.  You can feel the fairness when you have roughly the same opportunity to win the game as you opponent and whether you succeed or not is based entirely on the quality of decisions you make in respect to your opponents decisions.  You could imagine the unfairness you would feel, the lost sense of entitlement that would come from allowing you opponent to move twice for every one turn you move.  This type of chess would hardly be the same game at all.  It would be frustrating for you and boring for you opponent.  This example mainly would affect the difficulty and the overall functioning of the game.  However there are many more aspects to take into consideration when it comes to creating a well balanced game.

               

                I will run through the twelve balancing types and how they pertain to out team’s game, at this current stage of development.

#1           Fairness – In our game, I hope to give the player all the tools necessary to succeed in the game without playing the game for him.  Functionally the game should function properly and should be fair in the sense that the game doesn’t seem like playing it is hopeless or worthless.  There are games mentioned in the text that are “asymmetrical games”, I do not believe our game should or is going to be one of those games.  Even if we were to make our game character advantaged in respect to our enemies, you would still have to implement fairness.  And exaggerated example would be a game that contains a weapon that kills all the enemies in the level with one use, and from there you just make your way to the exit.

#2           Difficulty – We want our game to be challenging, but not so much so that it puts off new game players or average players.  We would also like to have experienced players enjoy the game with out feeling like the game is beneath their skills.  To do this we will implement difficulty selection that can be toggled at the beginnings of all levels of the game (mainly based on typing speed), with each level getting increasingly harder.

#3           Meaningful choices – I have not thought too much about what choices should be available in our game or the weight that those decisions will carry, but I’ll think about it.  Right now it seems like our game is relatively straight forward/ one pathed design for levels.

#4           Skill vs. Chance – I think skill will show itself significantly more than chance in our game.  I can’t think of too many reasonable ways that we would implement chance into our game and I quite frankly don’t think we should include it at all, at least on any major level.

#5           Head vs. Hands – I would say for our game that hands are definitely the most important aspect of the gameplay, whether typing or shooting.  If you are typing or shooting at something it doesn’t necessarily take too much mental work to know what to do, your mind has to engage and process the information but does not necessarily require too much mental though.

#6           Competition vs. Cooperation - Our game is a single player game and it looks like the nature of the game will be competitive against the computer players/characters.  And possibly high scores.  I don’t see cooperation fitting in all that much.

#7           Short vs. Long – I feel that our game would best benefit, for the purpose of the class, from being a short to medium length game.  The game should be long enough to feel like more than a level or too, but unless we added many more features in the game it would become much more repetitive.

#8           Rewards - The way I imagine it, at the end of the levels you will receive a letter grade based on your typing and shooting performance for the entire level.  From this score you will receive a certain amount of point to use on upgrades or other aspects of character development.

#9           Punishment – If you wanted make your game completely balanced, then in theory every time you offer a reward you would offset it by offering a punishment.  I don’t think punishment has a role in our game and if anything I would like the player to fail the level as many times as they want with no penalty.

#10         Freedom vs. Controlled Experience – It would be nice to offer our character more freedom within the game.  This certainly can be done within the levels, but I believe it is too far out of the scope of the class and our particular game to benefit from an increased level of freedom (mainly speaking in terms of levels.

#11         Simple vs. Complex – Our game will be simple and complex.  Mainly simple, but it you take a simple concept and apply it in a way such that it becomes complex it adds a depth to it arguably more than a standard complex game.  In our game typing will be the simple, the typing challenges will be the complex.

#12         Detail vs. Imagination – I’m not sure how much should be left content should be left to the players imagination in this game, because you are assuming the role of someone else with a fixed mission.  So at least in terms of story, it is almost like an action oriented RPG.