This week we talked about the concept of balance when it comes to game development.  For some games, balance is one of the most important things to get right.  I feel that balance is more important for multiplayer games that constantly introduce new content to the game.  When I think of balance, I think of Overwatch. Every time a new hero is introduced to the game, there is a new issue of balance.  Usually when a new character is put into the game, it is either overpowered or encourages a new meta to form around that character which then throws the balance of the game off.  Sometimes when a new character is put into the game, their new abilities can encourage players to choose certain characters to either compliment or counter the new character.  This then can even make characters that were perfectly balanced before, seem all of a sudden more powerful or completely useless in the face of a new meta. I understand that it can be extremely difficult to predict how the balance of the game will be affected when adding in something new. I think what adds a new layer of difficulty is creating a new character that has its own unique abilities and place within the game and trying to predict how the game will evolve. In the video we watched, I found the statement “balance isn’t everything” to be interesting.  I think this also can been seen in Overwatch since there are many players whose love for the characters matter more to them than how balanced they are in the game.

During class we even discussed the issue of spawn camping.  This represents that balance in a game also comes from the maps.  When I think of map balance, I think of Halo.  There are certain multiplayer maps in Halo that are a little bit unbalanced. One teams base may be a little more open than the other.  If a team were to reach a certain area of a map first, then they will be able to spawn camp the enemy team and there isn’t much to be done about that.

Works Cited

Fullerton, Tracy. Game Design Workshop: a Playcentric Approach to Creating Innovative Games. CRC Press, 2019.

 

 

In class, we discussed the issues of game balancing. One particular problem with thinking about balancing during development is that developers may not consider a possible action that players may take. One of the examples brought up is in Fullerton’s example in Game Design Workshop, where a multiplayer first-person shooter game presents a problem where players are spawn killed by opposing players. I think a lot of this problem depends heavily on the objective of the game they are playing. 

The solutions illustrated may have their respective cons reduced or nullified based on the objective of the game. One of the solutions offers a way where areas that players spawn are protected, with one of the cons being that players can still wait further outside the protected areas to kill the recently spawned players. For example, in League of Legends, while not an FPS game, does have a solution against spawn killing in the early- and midgame, which is that the area in which the player spawns is so far removed and protected from the enemy players that there is no realistic way to spawn camp in the early- or mid-game without the risk of the attempted spawn killing player dying themselves with little to no reward. By the late-game, many of these protections may be destroyed, reducing the risk of spawn-killing. However, when the game comes to the point where the protections are destroyed to the point where players can effectively camp outside the spawn point, the team with its protections destroyed has already effectively lost the game in all other aspects besides kill scores, and has a very low chance of making a comeback.

In a video we watched, one of the developers at Riot Games talks about the struggle of balancing playable characters for both experienced and inexperienced players. I think this is a positive point of view to have, as it signals and effort in trying to avoid the gatekeeping of “noobs” in other games due to the learning curve and creates a community where professional “hardcore” gamers are overvalued, while players who do not fit that mold are looked down upon. 

Sources:

“Chapter 10.” Game Design Workshop: a Playcentric Approach to Creating Innovative Games, by Tracy Fullerton, CRC Press, 2019.

“Balancing League of Legends for Every Player, from Bronze to Bengi.” Youtube, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ii_Q4OCoHvU.

This week we spoke about unbalanced games and how to deal with them. There are many different things that go into a game or when you make changes to one. When reading the Fullerton Chapter about functionality and balance there was a section that spoke about a problem with the respawn spot and how to stop players from being spawn killed over and over again. The solution that the designers come up with has to be enough for the player to be able to spawn back in without dying again immediately, but have to find a way that it also doesn’t mess up the game or ruin the player experience. An example of one of the solutions that Fullerton came up with is having the same number of spawning points on a map should be equal to the number of players in the game. A pro that came out of this is that players have at least one safe point on which to spawn. I liked this because there are many games that kind of use this concept already and it works sometimes. But a con is that you have to design the maps arena specifically to the number of players that are gonna play. Fullerton goes on to explain how maps can’t facilitate a fluctuating number of players compared to other FPS games. In class we watched a GDC video on the balancing for league of legends. Listening to Greg Street talk about the balancing of characters in League of Legends, helps give me an understanding of what developers are thinking when making or balancing characters. I’ve never played League, but I have played other games where you team up with a group of people and you pick a character/champion/operator to play for that round to help your team win. I have run into situations where I see a character and say “Wow that’s not balanced. They’re way too overpowered”. Greg says that balance isn’t everything and that many people have their own reasons for playing specific champions. So just cause they see people playing on champion a lot doesn’t mean that should nerf them cause that will upset players. This week really helped me see what a developer has to take in account when trying to balance a game.

This week we talked about dealing with unbalanced games. There are different aspects that we have to take into account when we want to make changes to the game. One example that we talked about was the spawning system for a shooting game. I personally find the GDC video interesting. I understand now why every new Dota heroes that Valve release tend to be overpowered then underpowered. In a sense, it’s better to create overpowered elements and then have to scale it down later than to do the opposite. Another thing that I realize is that, online games tend to have more changes than physical games such as card games or tabletop game. I think it’s because it’s easier to send those changes to the players online, since all they have to do is update the game. The company also keeps releasing updates to keep the players interested in the game.

In Fullterton’s chapter 10, she also talked about symmetrical and asymmetrical design. Symmetrical games are games in which each player has the exact same starting conditions, resources and states. On the other hand, players in asymmetrical games do not. For example, chess is pretty symmetrical since the white has the same 16 units as the black, however it is still not 100% symmetrical since it’s a turn-based game which means one has to go first. I would say most of the games out there are fairly asymmetrical, especially video games. When it comes to asymmetrical games, I think it’s harder to make them balanced because we have different kinds of elements that we have to balance. For example, in games such as LoL, Dota, or Overwatch, how do we know that this specific healing character is better than the other one. Although in game such as Overwatch, even if there is an underpowered character, both teams still have access to all the characters so it’s still fair and balance in that sense. However in Dota, a hero cannot be picked twice and be on both teams.

So it’s good to notice these differences in the design so that we can balance or make changes to the game accordingly.

Works Cited:

Fullerton, Tracy. Game Design Workshop: A Playcentric Approach to Creating Innovative Games, 4th Edition. 2019.

This week pertained mostly to balance in games, as well as how to design a game that is fair for everyone. We touched on many games this week, but we specifically talked about two games near and dear to my heart, being “Hearthstone” and “League of Legends”. These games both have had their issues with balance, but exemplify the importance of balance in online games as a whole. To begin, “Hearthstone” is a card game made by Blizzard Entertainment based on the Warcraft universe, and has garnered a massive audience since its launch in 2014. I have been playing this game since the first year it was released, after the game had already received its first three expansions. I can remember ten times off of the top of my head when this game was imbalanced. It is incredibly difficult to get balancing right the first time, especially in a card game, and Blizzard is usually quick to responding to feedback, now more than ever. Just recently, Blizzard added a whole new class to play as in Hearthstone, the Demon Hunter. This class is based on the class of the same name in “World of Warcraft”, and features a play style similar to the MMORPG as well. Rushing the enemy down with low cost cards, attacking with weapons for extra utility, and healing while dishing out damage is what Blizzard imagined when designing the Demon Hunter. This playstyle is similar to the Hunter, who relies on taking control of the board and keeping it with powerful Beasts and spells, with a hero power that helps whittling the enemy’s health down. However, Hunter has little to no healing, with Hunter relying on a control or midrange playstyle. Demon Hunter on release could do everything other classes could do, but better. An incredible early game with sticky low cost minions and spells? That beats the zoo playstyle of Warlock. Playing tons of cards in one turn while drawing through your deck for amazing tempo swings? Demon Hunter’s draw still rivals the Rogue. Massive minions to seal out the game with, as well as massive spells? Mage and Shaman wish they could have some of that. It was almost insulting how powerful Demon Hunter was on day one, and it was solely based on the Demon Hunter’s most powerful cards. The 10 most powerful cards of the class found their way into every deck, making Demon Hunter have the highest winrate in Standard play, Wild play (which allows for use of all cards ever printed in the game), and Arena play (which gives the player a semi-randomly generated deck to play with against others). A class that had been in the game for one day was dominating the entire card pools of other classes which had been in the SIX years. Blizzard, however, acted accordingly and hotfixed the game on day two of the expansion, making the game much more fair for all of the other classes. This, among many other stories in the history of “Hearthstone”, have shown the importance of balance. When it comes to Riot Games and their MOBA “League of Legends”, Riot is notorious for having issues with balancing. They have said that they like releasing champions to the game strong in order to shake up the meta and then act accordingly, but this has led to some very sticky situations. For example, at one point in the game’s 10 year lifespan, a certain champion, Kassadin, had a 95 percent ban rate in all competitive play. At this time, Kassadin was running away with games, effortlessly destroying anyone who would face him, and could easily “1v5” an entire enemy team. Today, Kassadin still has a very strong late game presence, but is quite weak during the early game, making him much more balanced than he was during his “reign of terror”. To conclude, balancing is incredibly important in any game, no matter what the genre or audience. If intense care isn’t taken to balance, players will find how to break your game. While sometimes things can slip through the cracks, testing is of the utmost importance.

Last week we playtested our group games in class. This was a very interesting process as my team had decided to make an analog game before physical classes were stopped. We decided to keep the analog idea even though we would be doing all the work remotely and this led to a lot of creativity, on our part, for visualizing gameplay and allowing people to playtest our game. I give a lot of credit to Jackson, one of my group members, for running the gameplay for the testers. He printed out the physical cards and was able to work with the playtesters so that he was moving the cards for them and they could fully be able to visualize and interact with the game. This allowed us to receive more detailed and accurate feedback than if we had just sent them the rules and had them visualize it themselves. We were able to get some good feedback from our participants and were able to incorporate that feedback into the final version of our game. Although we had many of the same issues playtesting as we did doing the project, communication, we were able to overcome this and produce a good final game. 

Although our playtesting was unconventional we were able to follow a lot of the guidelines from Fullerton. The playtesters were of our target audience. We had aimed for the game to be played by young adults, which our classmates are. We were able to write down questions beforehand and make sure they were not leading questions so that we could get true answers from our playtesters rather than an answer that we wanted to hear. We were able to leave ample time after we played two rounds of the game to collect some very good feedback.

Works Cited

Fullerton, Tracy. Game Design Workshop: a Playcentric Approach to Creating Innovative Games. CRC Press, 2019.

This week’s Fullerton chapter was “Functionality, Completeness, and Balance”.  The author discusses how games are complex systems, and users often find unexpected ways to do things you may not have anticipated, which is why playtesting is extremely important.  While reading this, I became reminded of what Riot Games is doing with their beta for their upcoming game VALORANT. They have decided to release access to some players for playtesting before they release the full game in the summer.  During this playtesting time, players have already discovered unintentional “features” the game has. One of the champions, Cypher, has a camera that watches enemies. Players found a way to get a gun on the camera and shoot with the gun in camera-mode.  This is definitely not what Riot Games intended, but if they hadn’t had playtesters, they never would have known it to be an issue. This goes to show how difficult it truly is to test games, especially extremely complex ones. Another thing the chapter talks about (and what we talked about in class) was spawn points in a game.  There are multiple solutions to campers at spawn points, such as a force field, which many shooters utilize. However, there are pros and cons to every single option. Every shooter game is different when it comes to spawn points, and while some may work better than others, they all have their negatives as well. It is hard to come up with a completely balanced game, especially when considering variety with characters you are allowed to play.  For example, some characters have abilities that are seen as too “OP”/annoying for players to tolerate. An example of this is Clash in Rainbow Six. She was banned in ranked for a period of time but has since been unbanned. Because of this, she is always getting voted out by players in the initial ranked banning phase due to the annoying nature of her ability.

Overall, there is a difference between a loophole and a feature in a game, as expressed earlier with the VALORANT example.  This is why it is super important to get as many playtesters as possible and try to perform actions that aren’t intended in your game to see if you get the desired outcome.  It is hard to identify every bug, however – even the biggest game developers struggle with this.

Fullerton, Tracy. Game Design Workshop: a Playcentric Approach to Creating Innovative Games. CRC Press, 2019.

In this week’s lecture we kind of wrap up our group project by submitting a team evaluation form. In Tuesday’s class, we focus on three parts of a game design process today, functionality, completeness, and balance. For example in class today we talk about the spawning position of the player after they died in the game, it is an important aspect to discuss about when designing a game. For example in a first-person shooting game, like in CrossFire this game when you died you will respawn in your own base with 5 second time period that you are invulnerable because someone can just snipe you or hide behind you in your own base. The same concept can also be seen in the game League of Legends you respawn in your own base when you died and there exist an overpowered turret can dramatically kill the enemy champion if they try to dive in the pool and kill you in the base. In the second part of the class we watch a youtube video called “Balancing League of Legends for every player, from Bronze to bengi” In this video, It talks about how different it will be if they try to balance the game for top tier players vs low tier players. It’s a hard job to balance a game when the difference between a pro player and low-leveled is too huge.  But there is still different aspects we can focus on when we try to make a change. From the character aspect, the overpowered heroes or their passive, abilities can be counted if you spend time studying the game and understand their weaknesses. And also another aspect to consider is that if the game designer makes the abilities are hard to execute, only the top tier players will be interested in doing that, the low tier players still trying to learn and understand how to play the game better. There are so many other minor things it talks about in the videos such as strong window power, this allows the players that in a short period of time is more powerful than other teams, this can also be an aspect to think about when balancing a game. One example of this is that there is a monster called Baron if your team kills it, you will get a buff for your whole team to grant you extra power for a short period of time. Throughout this video, I really learn a lot about the perspective of a designer. Right now when I play the same game I have a different feeling now, I look deeper than just playing the game. I think about is it balanced, right now I will spend time to look at the patch notes riot post out, to see what changes they make for the current patch. And through those changes, I take my time to think about why they make those changes.

In this blog post, I will be talking about chapter 11 from the textbook Game Design Workshop, by Tracy Fullerton. The chapter topic is about fun and accessibility in video games. As a gamer having fun playing a game is the most important thing about playing games. Personally, I would not play a game that I would not like playing or considered boring. As a game designer perspective making a game has many challenges. They need to look at how challenging a game is, how to reach and exceed goals as well how the player can use different skills. Without any of these attributes, these games would be too easy or less appealing for players. In my opinion, making a game that is challenging enough for a player to the point that it is not too hard but also not too easy is something I look for in games. An example of a game that I play that has the right set of challenges is Apex Legends. The first person battle royal game provides challenges such as hitting your shots when in combat, using your abilities in an effective way against your opponents, and good communicating with your teammates.

The desire to achieve a goal is a fundamental part of being human. That being said, video games should have goals for players so they can be invested in the game. Goals do not have to be huge and can start off small. For instance, small accomplishments such as completing a mission or winning a first-person game are goals that players can do without them even acknowledging that they completed a goal. Smaller goals will interest players to play more and to achieve longer goals. An example of this would be the game Skyrim. Skyrim is a role-playing game, which has hundreds of side quests and main quests that you can do. When I played Skyrim, I started out doing side quests because the tasks were a lot easier. Once I finished a huge chunk of the side quests, I then started the main storyline. The main storyline was more in-depth and it took way longer, and because of that, I had more fun completing it.

Fullerton, Tracy. Game Design Workshop: a Playcentric Approach to Creating Innovative Games. CRC Press, 2019.

In this blog post, I will be talking about Chapter 10 from the textbook Game Design Workshop, by Tracy Fullerton. In this chapter, it talks about functionality, completeness, and balance in video games. Functionality means “that the system is established to the point where some who knows nothing about the game can sit down and play it” (Fullerton p. 313). For instance, if I play a game that is new to me is means it is a functional game. Something to consider is that functionality in a game does not mean that the game is complete. Completeness in games has many different sources of things it needs to fix to make a game complete. For instance, in shooter multiplayer games it is a huge concern with spawn camping. The developers need to think about how they can balance the spawn point. There are many different kinds of respawn points, such as a player choosing where to respawn. An example of this would be battle royal games. A battle royal game such as Apex Legends will let you drop anywhere you want on the map. Sometimes you will get lucky and have not enemies near you or sometimes you land where there are multiple enemies by you. In Call of Duty multiplayer, the game chooses where you spawn. In theory, the game tries to spawn you away from the enemies, but sometimes it is not possible due to enemy players being scattered around the map. Balance in games is very important and if a game is unbalanced, then fewer players would be interested in playing the game. For instance, I used to play Call of Duty Black Ops 4 when it first came out. I used to love that game because to me their gun line-up and characters were well balanced. When the game introduced new guns in loot boxes, it made the game extremely unfair. The guns that were in these loot boxes were way overpowered compared to the guns you got at the beginning of the game. This made me dislike the game so much that I chose to not play this game for multiple months.

Fullerton, Tracy. Game Design Workshop: a Playcentric Approach to Creating Innovative Games. CRC Press, 2019.