Requesting tools for balanced game.

[NoahJMina]

what im really asking for is something that will help me make a balanced game as in stats (HP, MP, MAT, etc.)

should i be looking for tools for this or should i be doing this on my own 

tell me what you think

thanks,

noahjmina

 

[Reynard Frost]

You should be doing it on your own, that's called being a Designer.

 

[NoahJMina]

i take that offensively. how about suggesting i do it on my own? 

 

[Andar]

i take that offensively. how about suggesting i do it on my own? 

Sorry, but that wasn't offensive - it was stating a fact.

The problem is that it's impossible to make a game balanced without months of playtesting - there are too many parameters that need to be checked for any tool to make that automatically.

The best you could do is to make a data sheet with a program like Excel or OpenCalc and guesstimate which values might fit to each other. That will reduce the neccessary playtesting from about four month to only three months (my estimation, depends on how big your game is and how many additional playtesters you can find)

 

[NoahJMina]

The best you could do is to make a data sheet with a program like Excel or OpenCalc and guesstimate which values might fit to each other. That will reduce the neccessary playtesting from about four month to only three months (my estimation, depends on how big your game is and how many additional playtesters you can find)

is this what u do? or what others usually do?

 

[Andar]

is this what u do? or what others usually do?

It is what I do (and not only for RM Games, I've also designed my own PnP RPG rules where the balance is even worse to achieve), and if you look and search through the forum then you'll see that others do similiar things.

You cannot automate balancing unless you remove all random factors from the game - and even then there would be problems.

You know chess? That game only has 9 different pieces without any values and absolutely no random factors in it, played on a board where all tiles/positions are identical.

So it should be easy to automate compared to a RM game where each actor has eight different parameters, a selection of half a dozen skills (out of usually several dozens total), many dozens different enemies and playing boards that can have hundreds of different features, right? Ever tried to make a computer chess player to see how "easy" that would be?

I hope that you don't call that comparison offensive. There are some ways to automate minor parts of balancing (the random factors can be averaged for example), but they require that the automation is written along the engine of a specific game - which means that you can't use the same automation for a different game.

If you have specific cases where you believe they might be unbalanced, then you can ask for help balancing them. But there is nothing that will work on a general scale, and you need to have your basic rules in place before you can even start balancing. For example, there are RM-games where the player has only one actor and others where he can use eight actors in battle - it should be very obvious that the enemies in the first variant need different values than those in the second variant.

 

[Skyhawk]

I suggest that you playtest your game, and keep in mind levels, playtime, and difficulty you want that certain part of the game to be at. If the tester or yourself feel or notice that a boss of a certain part of the game one hits all your actors, even after you gained more stats, however the monsters in that stretch of the game were where you wanted them to be at, then you obviously have a target to work on. Keep in mind also, if you were simply pressing attack throughout those fights, that you might want to rethink your battle system entirley esspecially if you were at what you and your testers deemed as the average level of that area. Unless you are deconstructing the genre. Or FFXIII.

You can fix those aftermentioned problems by also implementing a level scaling script, which will help solve some balance issues for the game. However at the same time you must figure out a formula for the level scaling so the difficulty remains constant or scales slowly upwards throughout the game. You don't want your game becoming increasingly easy or spiking into a wall as tall as the Burj Khalifa.

In the end, a outside program can not help balance the game for you. Your game has to meet your own standards of balance. Want a hard game? Well you got to balance as you see fit. Same for easy, a baby's first RPG, or a game akin to DnD. All have to be done with your supervision, it's the only way.