Part

Balance

You might say: keeping choices live

Balance is the relationship between options, costs, benefits, counters and the challenge the player can reasonably meet.

What it does

Stops one part, strategy or progression path from making the rest of the system irrelevant.

Ask

Which choice is too cheap, too strong, too weak or impossible to answer?

Parts

• Part interactions: Part interactions are the causal relationships through which one part changes another part's state, value or available choices.
• Cost curves: A cost curve maps rising benefits or power to the resources, limits and opportunity costs required to obtain them.
• Transitive balance: In a transitive relationship, one option is stronger in the same role, so its cost must account for its greater benefit.
• Intransitive balance: In an intransitive relationship, each option beats one option and loses to another, so no option is best in every matchup.
• Hits-to-kill: Hits-to-kill (HTK) is the number of successful damage events needed to remove a target’s health after mitigation.
• Time-to-kill: Time-to-kill estimates elapsed time from the first valid attack to target defeat; a baseline is hits-to-kill times attack interval, but misses, cooldowns, travel, recovery and encounter context can change it.

Sources

1. Ian Schreiber, Game Design Concepts, Level 16: Game BalanceWithin a system that has several similar game objects
2. Ian Schreiber, Game Design Concepts, Level 16: Game Balance, What is Game Balance; balance types and playtestingWithin a system that has several similar game objects
3. Ernest Adams and Joris Dormans, Game Mechanics: Advanced Game Design, ch. 4 pp. 59–77; ch. 8 “Simulating and Balancing Games” listed in contents p. ixIncluding an internal economy is a good way to introduce a strategic dimension to a game
4. Ian Schreiber, Level 3: Transitive Mechanics and Cost Curves, Costs and Benefits; Cost CurvesIn transitive games, some things are just flat out better than others in terms of their in-game effects, and we balance that by giving them different costs, so that the better things cost more and the weaker things cost less in the game.
5. Ian Schreiber, Level 9: Intransitive Mechanics, This Week; Solutions to intransitive mechanicsan intransitive game is at least more interesting than one with a single dominant strategy
6. Ian Schreiber, Level 6: Situational Balance, Situational Balance; Playtesting: The Ultimate Solution?In each of these cases, finding the right cost on your cost curve depends on the situation within the game, which is why I call it situational balancing.
7. Ian Schreiber, Game Design Concepts, Level 16: Game Balance, What is Game Balance?; Balance in Single-Player Games; Balance between Strategies; Balance Between Game Objects; Three General Game Balance TechniquesWithin a system that has several similar game objects
8. Steve Swink, Game Feel: The Secret Ingredient, Context: movement speed, jump height, spatial placement and challengethe placement of objects in the world is just another set of variables against which to balance movement speed, jump height

Use it on your project

teardown-apply: hold "Balance" (balance-system) from the teardown at https://teardownatlas.com/game-design/ against my project

Paste it into a coding agent that has the teardown skills.

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