1) The document discusses game balancing and focuses on fairness and difficulty. It outlines various techniques for balancing games, including avoiding dominant strategies, managing perceived versus absolute difficulty, and using positive and negative feedback loops. 2) Factors that influence balancing are discussed, such as setting consistent difficulty levels in PvE games and ensuring symmetry in PvP games. 3) The summary provides an overview of the main topics and goals covered in the document relating to fundamental aspects of game design and balancing.

1. Fundamentals of Game Design
Game Balancing
Sayed Ahmed
BSc. Eng. in CSc. & Eng.
MSc. in CSc.
http://sayed.justetc.net
http://www.justETC.net
sayed@justetc.netWww.JustETC.net
Presented at the University of Winnipeg, Canada
Just E.T.C for Business, Education, and Technology Solutions
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2. Introduction
 To be enjoyable
 A game must
 Be well balanced
 Be not too easy nor too difficult
 Feel fair to competing players
 Feel fair to the individual player itself

3. Topics
 Qualities of a well balanced game
 How to balance your game
 How to set up and balance both
 Transitive and intransitive relationships among player choices
 Make them simultaneously
 Interesting and well-balanced
 Dominant strategies and how they affect balancing
 Ways to incorporate chance into games
 Where the better player still enjoy better rewards
 Will focus on two major issues of game balance
 Fairness and difficulty
 Fairness
 Player versus player
 Player versus environment

4. Topics
 Difficulty
 Player versus environment
 Various factors that affect the player’s perception of difficulty
 How to manage the factors
 Role of positive feedbacks
 How to use it
 How to control it
 Investigate the problems of
 Stagnation
 Trivialities
 Design games so that the tuning stage is still easier

5. What is a Balanced Game
 Balanced Game
 Fair to the player (players)
 Neither too easy nor too hard
 Skill of the player is the most important factor to win
the game
 What makes a balanced game
 Several different features together make the game
balanced
 A collection of design and tuning process create those
balancing qualities in a game

6. What is a Balanced Game
 Techniques for balancing may differ for
 Player versus player (may be artificial opponent)
 Player versus environment
 A well balanced game posses the following characteristics
 The game provides meaningful choices
 The role of chance is not that extreme that player skill becomes
irrelevant
 Well balanced PvP posses the following
 The players perceive the game to be fair
 Any player who falls behind early in the game gets reasonable
opportunities to catch up again before the game ends
 The game seldom or never results in a stalemate

7. What is a Balanced Game: PvE
 A Well Balanced PvE game posses the following
 The player perceives the game to be fair
 The game’s level of difficulty must be consistent

8. Avoiding Dominant Strategies
 What is a strategy
 The plan to play the game for victory
 Can be aggressive
 Can be defensive
 Two player may prefer two different strategy
 Ideally, they should have equal chance of winning
 Dominant Strategy
 A strategy that results the best outcome
 A player may achieve
 No matter what her opponent does
 Are undesirable – makes all other choices useless
 Worse: if one player can use the strategy – others cannot
 Happens in asymmetric games
 Makes the game unfair

9. Avoiding Dominant Strategies
 One single choice can be a dominant strategy
 Strategies that avoid loss or prevent an opponent
from scoring points
 May qualify as dominant
 Before 1955, a basket ball player could use endless
tactics - dominant

10. Dominant strategies in Video Games
 Some video games permit dominant strategies
 Command and Conquer: Tank Rush
 Madden NFL
 Fighting games prone to dominant strategies
 Fighting and football games
 Large number of offensive and defensive actions
 Difficult to test (for fairness and balancing)
 Bad character design may lead to dominant strategies
 Super street fighter II turbo
 Akuma: Air fireball

11. Transitive relationships among Player Options
 Transitive
 Relationship among three or more entities
 A> B, B>C, A>C
 Example: Strategic options
 Aggressive > Defensive > Stealth
 Aggressive > Stealth
 Smart player will always choose Aggressive mode
 To address the imbalance
 You may assign direct costs to each strategy
 That may lead to players to consider the weak strategies as well
 Riding horse may be more fun but costlier than riding bi-cycle
 Traveling with a Hummer will cost more than travelling with Ford
 Shadow cost
 PvE players find shadow costs are unfair
 Designers use transitivity to reward players as well
 Can be back and forth

12. Intransitive relationships
 Here the relationships among strategies, or options are
intransitive
 A beats B, B beats C,
 Does not mean that A beats C
 Rock->paper->Scissors
 Paper beats rock, rock beats scissors, scissors beat paper
 Balanced three way intransitive relationship
 Classic design technique to avoid dominant design strategies
 Forms the basis for balancing player strategies in many games
 Virtua Fighter 3 (David Sirlin) uses RPS for players movements
 Attacking beats throwing, throwing beats blocking, blocking beats attacking
 The ancient art of war: RPS three unit types: Knights, Archers, Barbarians
 K>b, b>a, a>k

13. Intransitive relationships
 RPS simple
 Not suited to modern war games
 Offers no interesting choices
 Needs some variation
 Adjust system to produce different benefits
 Give players different amount of money to win with
 Rock, paper, or scissor
 Target to earn the most money
 So make your choices like
 One choice is better than others in some situations but not in all
 Implement it in the core-mechanics
 Example: Race game: lizard, frog, mouse
 Advantages remain slight than overwhelming
 Course complex mixture of rock, swamp, grass
 Partial freedom to select routes
 Add some shadow costs
 Careful adjustment will make the game balanced

14. Orthogonal Unit Differentiation
 Each type of unit a player can control in a game
 Should be orthogonally different from all others
 Each unit unlike than the others in a different dimension
 Not in the same dimension
 Race: ford, dodge – speed – differ in only one dimension
 Make the units differ in power at one aspect but offer different
qualities with each unit
 To offer a large variety of strategies
 To make the choice more interesting
 Every unit should have capabilities that others don’t have
 Each unit plays a distinct role
 Little point to offer weaker units only upgradable to more powerful
unit

15. Orthogonal Unit Differentiation
 The more diverse your challenges are
 The easier to offer orthogonally different units
 Racing games are not good places as all the players
will face similar challenges
 War games can easily offer orthogonal units
 Such units also help to prevent dominant
strategies
 Define the victory condition in such a way
 The player must use a variety of different units to win the
game

16. Dominant Strategies in PvE Games
 One action to surmount all challenges
 Makes a dull game
 Games usually offer more challenges than actions
 With a smaller set of actions players can
 Experiment with the actions to overcome the challenges
 Fewer actions does introduce a potential problem
 Powerful esp.
 Actions that can overcome several different kinds of challenges
 You risk to create exploits
 Actions so powerful that the player may become unstoppable
 No straight forward rule
 But testing will help
 Try to play with as many actions and combinations possible to defeat a challenge
 Smaller actions offer testability
 Be careful with power ups and special actions that gives the player more power than usual

17. Incorporating the Elements of Chance
 Use chance sparingly
 Chance affects only minority of actions
 Balance the effect of chance as follows
 Use chance in frequent challenges with small risks
and rewards
 Allow the player to choose actions to use the odds to
his advantage
 Allow the player to decide how much to risk

18. Making PvP Games Fair
 Fairness in PvP Games
 The rules give each player equal chance of winning
 At the beginning of the game
 The rules do not give advantages or disadvantages to players
unequally
 during the game in ways that they cannot influence or
prevent
 apart from the operation of chance

19. Balancing Games with Symmetry
 Decide the game to be symmetric or asymmetric
 At the beginning
 All PvE games are asymmetric
 Symmetric PvP games are easier to create
 Whatever you do for one player
 You do it for all players
 Give similar resources and power in the beginning
 Also same condition

20. Balancing Asymmetric Games
 Fox and Geese Example
 Testing all possible combinations
 Be lengthy

21. Making PvE Games Fair
 The game should offer the player challenges at a consistent maximum levels of difficulty
 No sudden spikes
 The player should not suddenly lose the game
 Without warning
 And through no fault of his own
 Learn by dying
 The immortal
 Give warning of danger
 A stalemate should not occur
 A condition from where both win or lose is impossible
 The game should not ask for critical decision without informing the player with all information
 Monty on the run
 All the factual knowledge required to win the game should be contained within the game
 The game should not require the player to meet challenges not normally presented in the game’s
genre
 Puzzle in Simulation Game

22. Managing Difficulty
 Flow State
 Ability balances with the difficulty
 Peak Productivity
 Too Much Challenging
 Causes anxiety
 Too Easy
 Causes boredom
 Absolute Difficulty
 Perceived Difficulty
 The perceived difficulty of a well balanced game should remain
within a certain range
 Should not have sudden spikes or dips

23. Other Balance Considerations
 Balance Consideration
 Avoiding Stagnation
 Avoiding Trivialities
 Avoiding Stagnation
 The player is stuck – he does not know what to do
 The game did not give him enough information to act
 Hidden switch concept in first person shooter games
 PvP: happens rarely
 Stagnation can happen if the resource level is too low to act
 PvP
 Hidden boss enemy (after all enemies are destroyed)
 Set a separate victory condition
 Destroy the headquarter
 Try to give some guide/hints at stagnation points
 Gentle nudge

24. Avoiding Trivialities
 Avoid uninteresting details
 Example
 Fuel Consumption, Where to store gold
 Police Game

25. Design to Make Tuning Easy
 Design to make tuning easy
 Use generalized mechanics
 Separate the code from data
 Tune the mechanics for each entity separately
 Fine tuning your game
 Modify only one parameter at a time
 Changing multiple parameter at once makes it difficult to understand which change
affected the outcome
 When modifying parameters, make big adjustments, not small ones
 Double or half the value of a test parameter
 Keep records
 Focused on tester and testing
 Be sure your programmers use pseudo-random numbers
 To regenerate the issue

26. Managing Difficulty
 Perceived Difficulty
 Hard to compare difficulty level of different types of challenges
 Even with the same type of challenges, it’s difficult to compare
difficulty level
 Complexity differs from person to person
 Factors Outside the Control of the Designer
 How much time the player has spent playing the game
 Or faced similar challenges in similar games
 How much native talent the player brings to the game
 In multiplayer games, it’s the skills of the opponents that make the
game hard or easy
 Though if the game is fair not much effort to manage difficulty
 Set difficulty of the challenges as posed by the environment

27. Types of Difficulty
 It is the perceived difficulty that matters most
 To design a challenge of your perceived difficulty
 You should consider the following
 Intrinsic skills required
 The stress
 Power provided
 In-game experience
 Absolute Difficulty
 By using the absolute difficulty
 you will be able to compare the difficulty level of different
challenges

28. Types of Difficulty
 Reactive Difficulty and Power Provided
 In addition to measuring absolute difficulty
 You need to measure
 The power the player has been given
 Relative difficulty
 Difficulty of a challenge relative to the player’s power to meet the challenge
 Perceived Difficulty and In-Game Experience
 In-game experience:
 The amount of time the player has spent to overcome any particular type of
challenge
 Level designers can keep this in mind for designing the difficulty level of games
 Perceived difficulty = absolute difficulty – (power provided + in game experience)

29. Managing Difficulty
 Creating a Difficulty Progression
 The difficulty should increase with time
 Increase absolute difficulty
 Also increase power of the user
 increase relative difficulty as well
 Make the perceived difficulty also increasing
 In a balanced game the perceived difficulty either
should not change or will increase

30. Establishing Difficulty Modes
 Games with multiple difficulty level
 The perceived difficulty will not go above a certain
point for a level
 Action and Action Adventure Games
 Designers normally
 Give the enemies more health,
 allow them to do more damage
 Make them more numerous
 Adjust the AI of the enemies

31. Dynamic Difficulty Establishment
 Max Payne: First Person Shooter game:
 Adjust enemy power according to player’s
performance
 Half-life
 Check the state of the health of the avatar

32. Understanding Positive Feedback
 Benefits of Positive Feedback
 Positive feedback discourages stalemate
 Positive feedback rewards success
 Controlling Positive Feedback
 Don’t provide too much power as a reward for success
 Introduce negative feedback
 Raise the absolute difficulty level of challenges as the player
proceeds
 Allow collusion against the leader
 Define victory in terms unrelated to the feedback cycle
 Use the effects of chance to reduce the size of the player’s
rewards