rugged fiber
Introduction:
In this post, I’d like to share the concrete steps we took to balance our game, the reasoning behind our choices, and some practical takeaways that other developers might find useful.
When developing a game (in our case a tower defense game), achieving a balanced gameplay experience can be challenging and time-consuming. Each tower’s unique attack patterns, from high-area-of-effect splash damage to precise single-target shots, must feel distinct yet fair. In Tower Alchemist, we spent a significant amount of time designing and refining a balancing methodology that would allow our towers, enemies, and ability systems to scale cohesively and remain engaging across multiple difficulty tiers.
Now as we know the problem... how did we do it?
Establishing a Baseline: Damage per Gold
Our first major balancing question was: How do we ensure that all towers, regardless of their firing style or effect, align with a common baseline metric? We decided to focus on a simple yet powerful metric: Damage per Gold (DPG).
- Controlled Test Environment: We created a test level where enemy units marched along a straight path. Adjacent to this path, we automatically placed six identical towers, ensuring consistent conditions. By using a fixed number of enemies (30 in our case), we could reduce variance caused by subtle positional differences —like a tower missing out on a shot due to a target stepping out of range by a few pixels or muzzle rotation timings.
- Measuring Performance: As enemies walked through the gauntlet of these six towers, we recorded the total damage dealt. We then divided this value by the amount of towers and the tower’s construction cost in Gold, yielding a DPG value. For example, if an Arrow Tower dealt a total of 600 damage and cost 100 Gold, it effectively [....]
The rest of our Article can be found on Reddit:
https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/1hh5z2u/thats_how_we_mastered_game_balancing/
