Devlog 9

This week we began the intro into our BattleBattle Project. To start we learned a bit about Game Balancing, or adjusting different aspects of a game to try to make it feel as fair and enjoyable to all players as possible. As Jesse Schell defines balancing, it is simply just “adjusting the elements of the game until they deliver the experience you want (Schell Game Mechanics Must Be in Balance). Balancing can take the form of reducing the power of an overpowered character or item, and inversely it can be increasing the power of something that is underpowered. Balancing could also look like revising a system to reduce the roll of luck or continue to give the players that sense of agency that we spoke about at the beginning of the last project. 

To actually move into the BattleBattle project, we were handed an intentionally unbalanced game and told to think about steps to take to try and balance it. In other words, our goal was to try to make the game and the characters feel more Symmetrical by making all players feel as though they have equal resources and powers (Schell Balance).  This game consists of characters cards with different unique abilities, and players roll dice and use tokens as their characters to take away all the health of their opponent. This is done by rolling the higher number; higher number means you damage your opponent. Each character has unique abilities, some of which revolve around using a predetermined amount of tokens, denoted by the character card. The unbalanced parts were the characters, some of them simply needed an adjustment in total health and some had absolutely unstoppable abilities. Trying to find these unbalanced aspects was actually really fun and enjoyable; it created a lot of moments where I felt invincible and noticed that my opponent didn’t feel quite as powerful. 

The actual project part of the BattleBattle Project was also assigned at the end of class; me and 2 others will create a similar type of game for 3 players where they must cooperate with each other to take down a shared opponent, which is not controlled by another player. This game will be Asymmetrical where the opponent will have different resources or powers than the players will (Schell Balance). The biggest focus of this project, in my guess, is going to be to make sure everything feels balanced and making the players feel challenged but not impossibly overwhelmed. So far my group left class with two ideas that I think are pretty solid to start: some kind of heist themed game or a school themed game where players need to work together to pass a really hard class. Looking forward I think my group will be able to really refine a solid BattleBattle game!