Sunday, June 10, 2012

The balancing act

I'm trying to get the balancing of monsters and items in Dweller just right, but it's not at all an easy task. I'm fairly certain that the game needs to become harder, but I don't want it to become too hard. I've started exporting the game data into formats that make them easier to share and explore. The first thing I started working on was a simple HTML output of the datafiles. The idea is to have something wowhead, but with static content generated at build time. Check out a first non CSS styled version of the monsters (SPOILER ALERT!) here.

When it comes to balancing the game I've taken that data and exported it to graphs to try and find monsters that stand out from the rest, either by being too hard or too easy. I calculate some kind of perceived power of the monster, the amount of XP you get from the monster and at what depth they are encountered:

I've managed to get perceived power and XP rewarded to be aligned, now I also need to make sure that you encounter the monsters at the appropriate depth as well. Things get a bit complicated though due to the side branches, but I think I'll manage to get it right eventually. Source and comments: http://www.dwellergame.com/2012/06/balancing-act.html

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