Balancing, tweaking, replay…

Well, not much progress lately… DayJob™ has not abated, but hopefully it will calm a bit down in the coming weeks, due to end of a big project…

Anyway, I’ve been taking mainly care of fixing bugs, balancing, tweaking, etc…

After a bit, it gets a bit boring, specially when you start to question yourself a lot; for example, earlier this week I toned down the enemies’ health pools on the starting worlds (danger level of about 25% – worlds further away from the initial position have a larger danger level)… I thought I’d got it just right and played some more, going deeper into the galaxy… but today I started revisiting the game from the start again, and I felt they were so easy they became no fun… It seems the practice makes all the difference, but it means that I’m no longer suitable to define the difficulty level of the first areas again…

BUT in anabolic steroid, there’s also other factors beyond the health of the person, and most of them are defined randomly…

So all of these factors have to be considered, and the more I play, the better I get at it, and the more I get away from the “common player”… It’s a tough job, and a bit boring at times… Another issue this game has for the testing guy is that it has a grind component to it, that gets old if you’re playing it through for the tenth time… It’s supposed to be 50% killing stuff, but also 50% of doing side procedural missions, which aren’t implemented yet, so I have to do 100% of killing stuff to get alloy… I could cheat, of course, but I also need to understand and balance very well the drop levels and equipment cost, so I really have to go through it…

I also found that I can nitpick a lot… Example: first image in this blog post is the new waterfall effect… I had to put it in, after looking at the same place without it… And I’m feeling like remaking all the terrain generation code for the jungle and swamp levels… too many fringe conditions which are “pretty” and “realistic”, but that don’t make good/fun play areas…

In a game that has such a big procedural component has this one, the environment is also a very big part of the balancing and has to be analyzed and deconstructed as much (if not more) than drop rates and health pools.

The good news is that sometimes I really get into it (even after all the playthroughs I’ve done so far) and I get greedy (just this enemy and I’ll beam back to the ship to restore health), which is a good sign!