I’ve been playing the game regularly for the past couple of weeks. It’s still rough around the edges, but a game is starting to emerge. And it has been fuel for my motivation to get this far.
Balancing
Balancing is way off, and needs more tweaking. Now that the game is playable, it’s actually possible to start working on the balancing. It’s surprisingly hard to get it right, because it demands playing the game over and over, in addition to always seeing it from an outside perspective.
I’m glad I built the game so that multiple NPC’s can fight each other, because that speeds up the play throughs a lot. Playing through one session takes only a few seconds. The wealth graph shows me how the session progressed.
The way I work with balancing, which so far has brought me a little closer to something that’s playable, is that I do the first few rounds myself. That gives me an idea of what values to tweak. I do the tweaks and then set up the game for automatic playing, and run it few rounds.
What I’m looking for is sessions where the player’s wealth are more evenly distributed after a run. It’s not that fun to be completely left behind a player that becomes many times richer than me. And it’s not that fun to be that player either.
To have a playable game
It never ceases to amaze me the impact it has on my motivation and productivity, to reach the stage where the game is playable. To be able to play your own games gives a whole new perspective on the game. It’s no longer a set of ideas and sketches, it has become a living thing.
The groundwork has been done, some of the hardest challenges to solve, have been solved. All I see now are opportunities, and no problems. It’s a very positive phase, which triggers an optimism that fuels the motivation to continue.
What to prioritize next
Now that all I see are opportunities, I have gotten a few more ideas for where to take this game. But I have also given myself a new challenge: what do I prioritize next?
To help myself, I rank features by a simple scoring mechanism. I currently only have two properties: impact and implementation.
Impact - How much of an impact on the player experience do I expect this feature to have? I want to create a game where every player has a chance to win, and where players that lag behind can catch up. Does this feature contribute to that type of game?
Implementation - How hard is this feature to implement?
The impact property is the most important one. I am looking for features that has the most impact. Therefore, the values of the property are ranked in decending order. High impact has a value of 3, medium 2, low 1 and negative impact is valued at -1.
The implementation property is not so important. If I find a feature that I think will have a high impact, I’m not going to let any difficulties in implementing the feature stop me from making it. It might be worth it. That’s why the values are ranked in ascending order. Easy to implement: 3, medium: 2, hard to implement: 1.
To calculate the final score, I use this simple formula:
impact * 100 + implementation * 10
A feature that I think will have a high impact on the player experience, and is easy to implement, will get a score of 330 (3 * 100 for the impact, plus 3 * 10 for implementation). If the feature was hard to implement, it would get a score of 310 (3 * 100 for the impact, plus 1 * 10 for implementation).
This way, high impact, easy to make ranks higher than high impact, hard to make. Now I can focus on the features that will give most bang for the buck, and that doesn’t cost me much to make.
Tip
I learnt that if you start a label in a Notion database with a number, like “3: High”, it will be parsed as an integer. The formula to use in the Notion database, becomes:
Next update
I will work a bit more on fleshing out the different ideas for new features. I need to get a clearer picture of the feature before I commit to it. But, judging from the table of ideas, I have two options that stands out.