Five important realisations about game balance

The games we've so far made at Ronimo have all featured a heavy emphasis on competitive multiplayer. Designing, testing and iterating these games, especially our biggest hit Awesomenauts, has taught us many things about balancing. Today I'd like to share some of the most important lessons we've learned along the way.

1. Overpowered is much worse than underpowered

At first glance one might think that in game balance, underpowered and overpowered are equally bad: they both mean something is badly balanced and needs to be improved. This is true, but in practice overpowered things turn out to have way more impact than underpowered ones.

The reason for this is that players tend to flock to whatever is strongest and use only that. For example, Awesomenauts has 34 characters. If 3 of those would be underpowered, then most players wouldn't play those, leaving 31 valid characters. That's still plenty of choice and variation. On the other hand, if 3 characters were overpowered, then players would play only those 3 and would ignore the rest. That would make the game very repetitive and turn stale quickly.

This knowledge can be used as a crude tool in cases where no better solution is available. For example, if something is overpowered but only under certain circumstances, then you might choose to nerf it until it's okay under those circumstances only and is underpowered in all other situations. This way at least it isn't dominating the game anymore.

2. Variety always adds imbalance

A game with just one weapon on just one symmetrical map will pretty much automatically be balanced. Even if only because all players are in exactly the same situation. Such a game would however probably not just be balanced, but also be boring. So we need to add variety: more weapons, more maps, more items, more builds, more everything. Maybe even asymmetrical maps. The key thing to realise when doing this, is that as the game becomes more complex, 'perfect' balance becomes ever more difficult to achieve. This quickly gets to the point were 'perfect' balance is impossible, and every bit of variation you add makes the game a bit more unbalanced.

Let's look at a really simple example: walking speed. Let's say some characters are fast and others are slow. This gives the slow characters a disadvantage that can be balanced by giving them more health and damage. However, now we also add maps of different sizes. On a bigger map, the disadvantage for the slow characters will be bigger than on a small map. This is because if the arena is small, slow characters can get to the other side fast enough anyway. No amount of health or damage tweaks will fix this, since it differs per map.



One solution to this can be found in our game Swords & Soldiers 2. There in matchmade online matches, we only use certain maps: the ones that we feel are most balanced. On the other hand, when you invite a friend to play, you can choose from all maps, including a bunch of pretty weird ones. Those might be less balanced, but they add a lot of spice and fun. Depending on how much you want to appeal to players with a competitive mindset, you can choose to include those varied but imbalanced maps, or not.

3. Competitive players often dislike randomness and luck

When Awesomenauts launched, the game had random crits, which dealt a lot of extra damage. This added surprise and suspense: every hit might be extra strong! It also means that even if the opponent is better than you, you might occasionally win because you got lucky. This makes a game a lot more friendly for beginners. An extreme example of this can be found in Mario Kart: this game includes a lot of randomness. Combined with a bunch of catch-up mechanics, Mario Kart is a game where occasionally a n00b can beat a pr0.

However, randomess also adds bad luck: sometimes you clearly outplay an opponent and still lose, because the enemy got lucky and landed several crits in a row. In a sense this might feel nice: since the opponent clearly just got lucky, you don't need to blame yourself for losing. Many competitive players however don't want this to factor into the equation. They want a very simple thing: the best player should win. "If I practice more and get better, then I should always win." In the years after release many players in the Awesomenauts community got better and more competitive, to the point where a lot of players really wanted the random crits to be removed from the game. For this reason we ended up changing crits into a predictable system where simply every third hit deals more damage.

4. Balance automatically becomes worse over time

Even if you think the balance in your game is in a good place, by simply leaving it as it is for a while, it will deteriorate. The reason for this is that as time passes, players get better at the game, learn new tricks and talk to each other. This changes how the game is played, thus also changing how the balance is experienced. Usually not for the better: as time progresses and no balance tweaks are made, balance usually becomes worse.

One example we've seen with Awesomenauts was that at some point after a few months of stable balance, one specific team discovered a new tactic that was super strong. This tactic had been possible for months, but somehow no one had found it yet. This tactic was then first used in a tournament, where that team gloriously beat everyone else and won. After the tournament, news spread like wildfire and suddenly this tactic was used in almost every match. We had no choice but to quickly do a balance patch specifically to nerf this one particular tactic. (The fact that our game is deep enough that players can discover new tactics this way is one of the things I'm most proud of in all of my career as a gamedev.)

Another example of balance getting worse over time might not even be caused by something actually being way too strong. Maybe there's something that's just slightly overpowered, so mildly that it really doesn't matter. As time passes, players write guides and talk about the best tactics. They will point each other at this subtle advantage, causing more and more people to use it. Even if the advantage is really small, or, even more extreme, even if the advantage doesn't exist and players are just imagining it, this still ruins the game for the simple reason that everyone starts doing the same thing. This makes the game predictable and boring.

Sometimes you get lucky and players start responding to that imbalance. Maybe an underpowered character happens to be really strong in that particular situation. Since that situation now happens so often, that underpowered character is suddenly super strong in most matches, causing lots of players to choose him. This makes the dominant strategy shift naturally from one thing to another, adding variation and fun. I've been told some games in the Super Smash Brothers series have balanced excellently for this: as soon as one character becomes dominant, its counter becomes extra interesting and lots of players start playing the counter, at which point the counter of the counter becomes useful, etc. This causes the balance to slowly but constantly shift.

5. 'Perfect' balance is impossible

The final point I'd like to share today is both soothing and intensely frustrating: for any game that has significant complexity and variation, perfect balance is impossible. This is a soothing thought in the sense that it makes you realise that even if you were the best game designer in the world, your game would still not have perfect balance. It's also frustrating, because of course the goal of the game designer is to make the balance really good. Knowing that the balance will never be truly fantastic makes balancing a frustrating experience.

So, why is 'perfect' balance not possible? I've already mentioned above that as more variation is added, it becomes impossible to make all options equally strong under all circumstances. But there's more. What about players of different skills? Some characters/weapons/maps are bound to be more difficult to play than others. The result is that for beginners, the balance will be different than for pros. And what about simply different tastes? Some players prefer fun and variation, while other players prefer predictability and skill. The balance can't make both groups perfectly happy. Combined, all of these elements make it impossible to achieve 'perfect' balance.

This post has shared some of the things we've learned through the years about balance. What are your most valuable or most surprising insights regarding balance?

PS. Some of the topics in this blogpost have been discussed in more detail in previous blogposts. If you'd like to read more, have a look at the following posts:

• The surprisingly many subtleties of designing crits
• The downsides of gameplay variety
• Beginner balance versus pro balance

Beginner balance versus pro balance

Game balance is often approached from the angle of the pro-gamer: how strong are things when used by a skilled player? However, the balance as it's experienced by beginners is equally important, since a large portion of the playerbase will never reach pro skill levels but will still want to have a fun experience. Today I'd like to discuss three different approaches we've used in our games Awesomenauts and Swords & Soldiers II to make the gameplay fun for beginners but also balanced for experienced players.

The big challenge here is that in a complex game with varied characters/weapons/factions/etc. it's nearly impossible to achieve perfect balance under all circumstances. Balance is influenced by almost everything and if you want variation, then that variation is undoubtedly going to upset the balance. For example, if some characters are faster than others, then having maps of different sizes can greatly change the balance on one map compared to another. The alternative is to make all maps the same size, but that's boring. For this reason balance is a moving target that you're constantly trying to get closer to but a certain amount of imbalance is (grudgingly) accepted in almost every game.



To make a competitive game fun for players of all skill levels, the ideal situation is to make it balanced for pro players, intermediate players and beginners alike. An example of striving for this goal are the changes we've made to the Awesomenauts character Gnaw. At some point Gnaw was heavily overpowered for beginning players, but mediocre at best for pro players. That meant that if we had nerfed (weakened) Gnaw for the sake of the beginner experience, Gnaw would have become totally useless for pro players. If simple nerfing is not an option, then what to do instead?

When a character is overpowered specifically in matches with beginners, this is often either because the character is too easy to play well, or because the counters are too difficult to figure out and perform. The nice thing is that if we can change the difficulty, it won't matter much for pro players: if the character becomes harder to play, pros will still master it. And if the character becomes easier to counter, that also doesn't matter for pro players: their opponents already mastered the counters anyway. Realising this doesn't make fixing the balance easy, but at least it gives us a starting point for where to look for a fix.



To modify Gnaw's difficulty for beginners, our designers made a number of changes over the years. Most of these revolved around making it more work to be effective with Gnaw. For example, initially Gnaw's Weedlings (little creatures Gnaw can leave behind to attack enemies) would live forever. One of the changes we made was that Weedlings would die after a while, requiring Gnaw to place them again. Weedlings were also changed to start weaker and become stronger over time. The result of these changes is that the player needs to be a lot more active to keep their Weedlings in the right places. Also, if the enemy has destroyed the Weedlings, Gnaw can't just replace them with equally strong ones right away.



Of course these changes also influenced the balance for pro players, but combined with some further tweaks we managed to keep Gnaw about equally strong for pro players while making him harder to play well for beginning players. Hence the pro balance remained similar while the beginner balance was improved.

Another Awesomenauts character with a similar problem was Ayla. Here too we made changes to make her harder to play well and easier to counter. While our designers did manage to improve Ayla's balance for beginning players, she remained problematic to counter for beginners.

Therefore when going free-to-play we employed a different tactic. In the free-to-play version of Awesomenauts, characters need to be unlocked with Awesomepoints, which the player can collect by playing the game. Characters have different prices. For example, some characters are difficult to play so we made them expensive to keep beginners from unlocking them right away. Since we had a problem with Ayla not being so much fun to play against for beginners, we chose to make Ayla expensive as well. This way few beginners will have Ayla and thus few beginners will encounter other beginners who are playing Ayla. This feels like a crude solution, but sometimes crude is the best one can do.



An even cruder solution that might be considered is that if a character is too damaging for the beginner experience, then maybe it's worthwhile to nerf the character to the point where it's okay for beginners, despite that this makes the character not viable for pro play anymore. An important thing to realise here is that with a cast of dozens of characters, a single character not being viable in pro play doesn't make that big of a difference since there are so many other options. However, a single character being overpowered for beginners will mean that lots of beginners play this character and it will ruin many matches.



The third example of fixing beginner balance that I'd like to discuss today comes from our real-time strategy game Swords & Soldiers 2. This game has 3 wildly different factions (Vikings, Persians and Demons), which gives enough headaches in terms of balance already. However, on top of that there is also a tactic that may be balanced, but that's just not fun for beginning players: rushing.

Experienced Swords & Soldiers 2 players can have a lot of fun harassing each other's economy as early as possible, forcing the opponent to spend their gold on defence instead of upgrades, or maybe occasionally even winning the game in under a minute. However, beginning players rarely start a match effectively. They're likely still reading some upgrade descriptions or thinking about what to do next. The result is that if the opponent employs even a very ineffective rush tactic, a beginning player will still be overwhelmed and lose in less than a minute.

For beginners this is highly frustrating, but since rushing is so much fun for pro players we didn't want to remove rush tactics from the game altogether. Instead we came up with something that's just for beginners: Starting Gates. Starting Gates are gates in front of each player's base that need to be destroyed before the base can be reached. This slows down rush tactics a lot and gives the defending player quite a lot of extra time to respond once the enemy soldiers come into view. Starting Gates are truly only for beginners: in matchmade online matches they're not placed if both players have played a bunch of online matches already.



Making the balance as fun for beginners as it is for experienced players is a hard and sometimes nearly impossible challenge. In this post I've given examples of 3 different tricks we've employed to improve beginner balance: Gnaw was made more difficult to play without making him stronger, Ayla was made more expensive so that beginners would encounter her less, and rushing in Swords & Soldiers 2 was changed for beginners by introducing a new mechanic that only applies to beginner matches.

These are all examples of looking at balance as a creative challenge, not just as a topic that's about spreadsheets and tweaking numbers. Have you used any nice tricks to improve balance? Please share in the comments!

The challenge of finding enough playtesters

I recently watched Jan Willem Nijman's great talk on The Art of Screenshake and noticed an interesting YouTube comment to that video by someone named SquidCaps. SquidCaps mentions that for an unknown developer, it's really hard to find playtesters who actually test regularly. I agree that this gets a lot easier the more well-known you are, but I think it might also help to try a different approach to playtesting. So I figured it would be interesting to discuss how we approach playtesting at Ronimo and how to find playtesters.

Let's start by having a look at SquidCaps' comment. It's quite long so I've selected only the parts that I'm going to reply to:

Heh, "let people play your game and iterate".. quite a bit easier to say when you have plenty of gametesters already in the office.. For solo, unknown developer, having just ONE game tester that suffers 10 minutes per week is too much.. What you need is full game, with menus, high scores save games etc, basically a beta before you get any testers and then you get plenty of them.. When it's still in alpha and the biggest, most revolutionary stuff is happening, then you are alone. Something that developers who are already successful almost always forget; you get plenty of free resources at one point. [...] The truth is that your mates play for a while but without actual team behind you, you can't support them enough, interest dies down and soon, you see that no one downloaded latest build.. [...] I've been on half a dozen playtesting groups with hundreds of members and they all fail.. The sad truth is that no one cares until you are almost done. big teams have people who they employ that can do playtesting and can even afford to pay for playtesting.. [...]"

Playtesting versus QA

Before actually getting into SquidCaps' comment, I'd like to start with making a clear distinction between playtesting and QA (Quality Assurance, not to be confused with Q&A which means Questions & Answers). QA is all about finding bugs, while playtesting is all about making the game more fun, more understandable and finding the right difficulty curve and balance.

QA is usually an extremely boring and repetitive task. For example, in our game Awesomenauts we've had cases where we hired people to systematically test whether all upgrades in the game function correctly. Awesomenauts has around 1200 different upgrades, so you can imagine that systematically testing them all is not a fun job. Another example of something that's done in QA, is trying to walk into walls to see whether collision is correct everywhere. This usually involves running into all walls in a game and is an incredibly monotonous thing to do. Since QA is so little fun, it's usually not done by volunteers or friends, but instead by professional testers who get paid to do this. Often QA is outsourced to specialised companies in low-wages countries. An alternative is of course that the devs do such testing themselves.

The goal of playtesting on the other hand is to figure out whether the game is fun to play, whether players understand how to play the game and whether the difficulty and balance are right. This is a completely different way of approaching testing. Someone who systematically goes through all 1200 upgrades in Awesomenauts is never going to have fun, so QA's way of testing is not going to tell you anything about how fun individual upgrades are to play with. To find out whether something is fun, you need to let testers play in a more natural, unforced way. You can then just observe how they play and ask them afterwards which things they liked and which they didn't.



Now that we have a clear distinction between QA and playtesting, let's get back to SquidCaps' comment. SquidCaps talks about getting people to play new versions of the game every week. For most purposes of playtesting I think you shouldn't just let the same people play every week. Of course it's helpful, since you can ask them questions like "Is the game more fun now than it was last week?", but you won't get a wide diversity of opinions from a small group. Also, these playtesters play with a preconceived notion of the game based on previous playtests, so their opinions will not represent what fresh players will experience.

For these reasons for Swords & Soldiers 2, spread out during development we invited around 120 people into our office so that we could observe them playing. Every few weeks half a dozen people would come in on a Saturday, play for a few hours and share their opinions. We made sure these were different people every time, so that we would get fresh, unbiased opinions.

For figuring out whether the mechanics and tutorial are clear you also need fresh players every time. Anyone who has already played the game can't truly judge whether the tutorial explains it well, since they already know how it works beforehand. Same for difficulty: after practice you get better, so you can't judge anymore whether it's playable for someone who's new to the game. This is also why the devs themselves are horrible playtesters: they know exactly how the game is intended and are usually really good at it, so they can't judge difficulty and clarity.



When to playtest

This is where I totally agree with SquidCaps: playtesting should start early on: "When it's still in alpha and the biggest, most revolutionary stuff is happening." I regularly encounter developers who think you need complete and bug-free gameplay to do your first playtesting, but there's no reason to wait that long. As soon as you've got something playable, you can let others play it.

Sure, in an early stage you probably need to sit next to the tester to explain a lot of stuff, but you can still learn a ton about which parts of the game are fun and which are not. It might even happen that the playtesters don't enjoy the core but really enjoy some other aspects of the game and this might lead you to change the direction of the game altogether. Or maybe they share some great ideas that you didn't think of yet. If you're wondering "Should I wait for the game to be more complete before testing?", the answer is almost always "Nope, just test anyway and see what you can learn!"

Finding playtesters

This is SquidCaps' main point: it's really difficult to find playtesters if you're not successful. I'd like to add to this that it's even difficult to find playtesters when you are successful: at Ronimo we've sold millions of copies of our games, but finding playtesters is still sometimes hard and takes time.

I think the best playtesting happens in person. That way you can see what the other person is doing and ask questions or help out if needed, especially when testing an early version of a game that doesn't contain a tutorial yet and might be full of bugs. That's why SquidCaps' approach of sharing builds online and joining playtesting groups is not something we'd consider until very late in development. We usually only share builds online for players to test in case of betas, like we do with Awesomenauts updates.

Instead, we mostly search in our local communities. For example, I occasionally talk at game dev schools here in the Netherlands. Whenever I do that, I end my talk with asking people to sign up for playtesting. Usually around 20% of the students in the audience do so, so we now have a significant number of email addresses of potential playtesters we can invite. Unfortunately in practice few of them actually respond, but it's still enough to get dozens of playtesters for a game, usually spread out over a bunch of Saturday afternoons.

When our mailing list runs dry, we look further. We've asked around at local game development schools, where students are often eager to visit a real game dev company and play a secret, unannounced game. We've also asked on social media, hoping enough gamers from the Netherlands follow us to actually get some visitors.

In total these usually get us enough playtesters. However, you can go further than that when needed. Here are some examples:

• I know a game company where the devs took an iPad version of their game, went to Gamescom and let people who were standing in line for some big triple-A game play their game. Queuing people don't have anything better to do so it's rather easy to get them to play for as much as fifteen minutes or more.
• Similarly, you can go to a random public space with a laptop and just ask people to play. If you're a student this could be the hall of your own school, or it could be a station, or anywhere really. This requires getting over some awkwardness when approaching strangers, but really, this is very doable.
• If you've got some budget you can also get a booth at a game event like Gamescom or PAX. Booths are not just nice for marketing but also for playtesting. Lots of different people will play your game and you'll get the most honest feedback in the world: the moment they don't like it anymore, they'll just walk away. Painful, but very useful information.
• You can organise local playtesting events together with other devs. Here in the Netherlands Adriaan de Jongh organises PlayDev.Club, which is simply a gathering of local devs who play early versions of each other's games and share feedback. If there's nothing like that in your community, you can organise something like that yourself, as long as you're in an area that has enough game devs.

None of these approaches will easily get us people who play our game for a huge number of hours. However, if our game isn't that fun yet then maybe that shouldn't be our focus and the focus should be on making that first hour super awesome. Once the core game is a lot of fun, it becomes easier to find playtesters who are willing to come back and invest more hours to get to the advanced tactics and pro skills.

While all of these ideas are easier if you're a more well-known developer and are better connected, with enough effort an unknown dev can also find playtesters in such ways. Before we released our first game Swords & Soldiers we also managed to find playtesters, despite being an unknown studio at the time. Finding playtesters takes initiative, creativity and effort, but in most cases it's doable even for those of us who aren't well-known.

These were some of the things we do at Ronimo and that I've heard from other developers. How do you find playtesters? What are your challenges and have you got any clever tricks?

The downsides of gameplay variety

An important goal in the game design of Swords & Soldiers, Awesomenauts and Swords & Soldiers II is gameplay variety. We try to make all the classes, units and factions play and feel as differently is possible. This makes it more fun to try them all and allows for much more interesting and varied tactics than if everything feels the same. It seems quite obvious that a game gets better if more diversity is added, as long as you have the budget to do so and it does not take away from the core vision. However, there are some serious downsides that are not as obvious. Adding more diversity can hurt many different aspects of a game, as I will explain in this blogpost.

When striving for variety it is important to be aware of the trade-offs. It does not mean that you should avoid diverse mechanics, far from it: it is a key element of the games we make at Ronimo! But consider the consequences before blindly adding variety.

A great example of such trade-offs can be found in the movement mechanics of Awesomenauts. We try to make every character feel different, not only their combat skills, but also their basic movement. Some characters can jump, others can fly, float, make little hops in the air or double jump. There is also variation in walking speed, acceleration and sliding time. Not all of the 21 characters we have so far are completely unique in their movement, but there certainly is a lot of variety. As the interplay between the different classes in Awesomenauts is a key part of the game, this diversity is really important to us.



So where is the trade-off? The problem is that there is such a thing as the ultimate jump. If a jump has the right duration, height and speed, it just feels excellent. Make it a little bit faster or slower and it is instantly less glorious. The jumps in the old Mario games are a great example of this. They strike a perfect balance and it feels awesome just to hop around.

This is where variety bumps its beautiful head. If every jump is to feel different, they cannot all hit that sweet spot. They can feel good in their own way, but it is practically impossible to make them all feel equally super. My colleague Fabian Akker, currently lead game designer on Awesomenauts, recently voiced this very clearly during an internal meeting: "Yes I can make this character faster and yes he will play better then, but I can't make them all be Mario because they will all feel the same." Adding variety will often make the individual parts feel slightly less good than possible, because there is only one "best thing in the game" and not everything can be that thing.

Another example where movement diversity can hurt a game is in graphics. In early prototypes of Awesomenauts we had a skill to walk on ceilings and another to walk on walls. For various reasons both were removed, and one of those reasons was how limiting this would have been to the graphics. To communicate clearly where the player can walk, floors need to be mostly straight and clear. If characters can also walk on ceilings and walls, they would have to be straight and clear too. That would have been a huge limitation to our art style! In this case adding diversity to the gameplay would have removed diversity from the graphics because of the restrictions imposed by the necessities of walkable surfaces.



Diversity is also a problem for balance. The easiest way to make a game perfectly balanced is to have but a single character. Boring, but definitely 'balanced'. As soon as you add more characters, balance quickly becomes infinitely complex and often practically impossible to achieve perfectly. In a previous blogpost I discussed how there are many sides to balance. Even if you manage making all the characters equally strong for pro players, they might still be imbalanced for beginners, in specific team compositions, or in some other way.

A great example of this can be found in map design. It is fun to have a bunch of maps that all play differently. But even the smallest difference can cause problems. If one map is larger than the rest, slow characters will be at a disadvantage. You might try to solve this by giving slow heroes buffs suited to large maps, but that probably introduces other problems. The simple truth: the more diversity, the more impossible it becomes to achieve perfect balance.

And yet balance is so important! How to handle this then? In Awesomenauts we had the problem that one map (AI Station 404) had a single lane at the centre, bunching up everyone. This gave characters with strong area-of-effect attacks (like Raelynn) too much of a benefit. We ended up modifying this map (into AI Station 205) and removing the old version from ranked matchmaking. The downside to this solution is that we lose some diversity in map layouts.



This is just one solution. Another would have been to show the players which map they were getting, so they could avoid certain characters when they feel they are underpowered on a specific map. This would allow us to keep the maps diverse, but at the cost of character diversity, since each map would probably see a more limited set of characters being used. In an ideal world one would find balance tweaks that influence only specific characters on specific maps. However, balance is so complex that such solutions do not always exist, or cannot be found.

Variety can also make a game too complex. I recently finished Advanced Warfare, my very first Call of Duty experience. At the beginning I was immediately overwhelmed by the number of guns, grenades, dashes and options. This is likely due to the series' yearly updates, which force them to add something every time to make it fresh again. At the end of the campaign I still couldn't remember the buttons for half the things I could do. This increase in possibilities adds burdensome complexity, requiring more explanations and tutorials.



We also see this in Awesomenauts: with every character we add it becomes more difficult for beginners to get into the game. In every match they encounter another new Naut they don't know how to fight yet. Having more characters adds longevity and depth, but might make the experience during the first few hours worse for some players.

As a final example I would like to discuss my own hobby project Cello Fortress. Cello Fortress is a hybrid between game and live performance, which means that players only play it for ten minutes each during an event (have a look at this trailer to see how it works). In such a short playsession I can hardly explain anything, so the game needs to be extremely simple. Sometimes players come to me afterwards and ask why I didn't add more diverse weapon. The answer is really simple: because there already is so much I need to explain and communicate during those ten minutes. Variety often adds complexity and there is a limit to how much a player can stomach in such a short session.



I love gameplay variety. My favourite game of 2014 is Far Cry 4, exactly because there is such a big open world where I can do all of these different things. Variety is also super important in our own games Awesomenauts and Swords & Soldiers. But it is important to keep in mind that adding diversity almost always comes with a cost somewhere, so you shouldn't be reckless with it. Add variety, but do it deliberately and take into account the trade-offs it always brings.

Special thanks to Roderick, founder of Leeuwenhart Publishing, for helping me improve my English writing skills. Roderick is the writer of the young adult book Pindakaas & Sushi (in Dutch) and did some freelance writing for Awesomenauts.

How chance in games is rarely just a roll of the dice

Games contain many forms of chance. From simply selecting a random character or level to play, to random pick-ups and even completely procedural worlds: chance, luck and randomisation play a huge role. While developing Awesomenauts we have experienced this first hand, especially in the various versions of Leon's crits, which has been changed several times in patches during the past 1.5 years. Last week I mostly talked about the psychology of crits, and today I am going to look at chance in games in general.

When a programmer is told to implement a random for something, he will often simply use std::rand() or something similar and that's it. However, in practice it turns out that both players and designers rarely really want a truly random chance.

A good example of this can be found in level selection in Awesomenauts: in a practice match there are four levels to chose from, and there is a 'random' button to select random levels. With a true random, the random button might result in playing the same level several times in a row. There is a small chance that a player gets the same level 4 times in a row (1.5625%, to be exact), and even 10 times the same level in a row is possible. When this happens, both players and designers start to voice complaints like “the random is not random, it always selects the same map”. Of course, in a truly random dice roll, the chances of throwing a number are completely independent of what was thrown before that, so even a million times the same value in a row can happen. The chance of that happening is just really small.



So what every game programmer needs to realise, is that when a designer asks for random, he rarely asks for a complete random. The random usually needs some extra logic to keep unwanted situations from happening. In Awesomenauts, the game remembers which map you last played and does not select it again for the next match (although if you join matches, you might still join several matches in a row with the same map). Similarly the music player remembers the last four songs it played and does not select those again when it chooses the next song to play. And I imagine that in a random dungeon generator it is likely not desirable to put instances of the same room next to each other.

An important part of random is human perception. Humans are exceptionally good at recognising patterns. In fact, humans are so good at this that they often recognise patterns where there are none. Noteworthy situations are remembered, while other situations are not. Astrology is for a large part based on this. If only one out of ten predictions turns out to be correct, many people will tend to remember that one correct prediction and not the nine false ones, making it possible for charlatans to pass for real predictors of the future.

Something similar goes for the perception of random in games. We have had numerous reports from players that the map they dislike most is selected much more often by the random map selection. However, every player who reports this reports it for a different map, and our random is just fine. What really happens there, is that people remember every time they get the map they don't want, and don't really remember what other maps they played recently.

Human psychology is therefore an important part in designing random. A great example of this can be found in one of my favourite game series: Civilization. Sid Meier did a hilarious presentation on how they modified their random in Civilization Revolution. One of the things they did is that if a unit has 90% chance to win, this is treated as 100%, because it turned out that it always felt unreasonable to lose when the win chance was 90%. Another trick they did is that if a number of 50% battles in a row are all lost, then at some point the next one is automatically won, because it simply feels unfair to lose so often in a row.

Of course, with a mechanic like that it is important to either keep players from knowing it works like that, or to keep a bit of random in there, because otherwise knowing how this works will result in exploitable tactics. If there is one thing we learned during development of Awesomenauts and Swords & Soldiers, it is that if something can be abused, it always will!



Inspired by the Civilization article, we started playing with Leon's crit chance. The original implementation we had for this was simply a clean chance. However, this sometimes resulted in having two or three crits in a row, which is incredibly powerful. Dying from this felt unfair, because it did so much damage that there was little opportunity to get away from it.

To solve this we modified the crit chance to never happen twice in a row, and also to never fail ten times in a row. This way the crits are still random, but the situations that feel unfair don't happen anymore.

This worked fine and had the desired result, but what we did not realise is that it massively changes the actual crit chance! With a 15% crit chance, the chance of it missing 10 times in a row is a surprisingly high 19.7%. Adding a guaranteed extra crit so often increases the crit chance significantly! So in that particular patch we accidentally buffed Leon a lot, making him pretty overpowered.

We did not realise we had done this until players started counting. They quickly noticed that Leon had become a lot stronger, but we simply didn't believe them. To convince us that something was wrong, a couple of players performed several hundred attacks in a row and counted how many crits they got. Even then we still didn't believe them at first, but once we understood what was happening here, we modified the crit chances to be the same as before again, including the extra rules for consecutive hits.


Image by Awesomenauts player 'Offline' (I think).

This brings me to the end of this blogpost. As the various topics I have discussed today have shown, there is much more to chance, luck and random in games than just using pure random functions. Whenever random is involved, the designer and programmer should always consider what they want exactly, since in practice it turns out that a true random is quite rarely wanted.

The surprisingly many subtleties of designing crits

Crits (or "critical hits") seem like a pretty straightforward topic: there is a certain chance that you deal more damage, and that's about it. It is easy enough to calculate average damage and balance based on that, and beyond that it seems like just a choice whether your game has weapons with crits or not. However, in practice it turns out that there are a lot of subtleties to crits that are not immediately apparent. In Awesomenauts we have had various implementations of crits and each time more subtleties surfaced. So today I would like to talk about their many aspects.

Crits can be applied to any weapon or attack and their core element is chance: there is a small chance that a weapon does extra damage. Usually this chance is low, below 30%. Instead of damage, the crit might also add other effects, like a stun or knockback. Crits are mostly seen in RPGs, where they are a nice way of spicing up the weapon variation. A sword that does 10 damage feels quite different from a sword that does 7 damage and has a 25% chance of doing 19 damage. The average damage output of these two swords is the same, but they feel and play very differently. Crits also add extra variation to levelling and upgrading: one can upgrade not only the base damage, but also the crit damage and the crit chance.



Crits are often a fun and interesting mechanic. While a normal sword always has the same result and is thus entirely predictable, a sword with a crit chance makes the player curious for every next hit. “Will it crit?! I hope it will crit!”

Adding chance to a game adds unpredictability. Having a lot of unpredictability greatly changes the feel of a game. A great example of this is Mario Kart. In Mario Kart when you grab a pick-up you usually get a random item and the effectiveness of the items varies massively. Picking up the right item at the right time often makes the difference between winning or losing the game. This is great for beginning players: even if they are playing against much better opponents, there is still a chance that the beginner might win because she has some lucky pick-ups. This makes a world of difference in comparison to purely skill-based games, in which the beginner will basically always lose until she becomes as good as her opponents.



Luck also has a soothing effect. If you lose because your opponent was better, then the player can do little but blame her own lack of skill. This can be frustrating. On the other hand, if luck is involved, the player can always blame that, which is much easier to accept. Most losing players need scapegoats to be able to cope with their own failure. Luck is a great scapegoat, just like the referee's mistakes are in soccer.

Knowing that players need a scapegoat actually helps in understanding player feedback. Any competitive online game has players complaining about balance, and as a developer it is important to realise that part of that is completely unrelated to the actual balance, and is just players needing a scapegoat to be able to accept losing that match. (By which I am of course not suggesting that balance in Awesomenauts is perfect. I am merely saying that a part of balance complaints are caused by players needing a scapegoat instead of actual problems in the balance.)

The above text may make it sound like crits only have benefits, but this is absolutely not the case. The big problem with crits and luck in general is that they take away part of the competitive nature of a game. If a player invests hundreds of hours into becoming highly skilled at a game, then losing a match because the opponent got lucky just plain sucks. Competitive players generally hate luck with a passion. This is the reason why in the end, we removed Leon's crits and turned them into a completely predictable consecutive-hit system.



Bluntly summarising today's blogpost, one could claim that crits and luck make a game more casual, while complete predictability make it more hardcore and competitive.

The title of this blogpost said I was going to talk about the many subtleties of crits, but it turns out that there are so many that I cannot cramp it all into one single blogpost. Therefore I will come back to this topic next week and talk about how luck in games is rarely just a roll of the dice, and how modifying crit chances in the wrong way can be painfully destructive to balance.

Edit: Here's a link to that next blogpost: How chance in games is rarely just a roll of the dice

The many faces of balance in an RTS

We are growing our team a bit further and are looking for yet another programmer at Ronimo, to write platform-specific code for the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3! This time someone with good knowledge of C++ and a couple of years of programming experience (though not necessarily in the games industry). Click here for more info! ^-^


I guess anyone who has ever played a strategy game, has an idea of how complex balancing the powers of three very different factions is. However, while we were developing Swords & Soldiers, I learned that there are several other forms of balance, and an RTS needs to achieve them all at once.

The balancing was done by my colleagues Olivier, Jasper, Fabian and Tom and I learned a lot of this from them. Especially Olivier is a hardcore Starcraft player and he brought in a lot of knowledge of what he had learned by following Blizzard's patches and articles on the topic over the years.

So, let's have a look at some of the many forms of balance in an RTS!

1. Faction balance

This is the standard balance that most people mean when they talk about balancing an RTS. Swords & Soldiers has three very different factions: the Vikings, Aztecs and Chinese each have different units and spells and even collect mana for their magic in different ways. The factions may be very different, but if you are a good player, then you should be able to win with each of them. So who wins is decided by your skill, not by which faction you play.



2. Beginner balance

While standard balancing looks at the situation for good players, it is also interesting to look at beginners. How difficult is it to play with a faction at all? In Swords & Soldiers, we deliberately chose to not make the game balanced for beginners. The Vikings are our easiest faction to understand the basic strategies, while the Chinese are a lot more difficult to play with. We wanted to add variation and spice to the game by making the factions different in complexity of the core strategies.

Interestingly, becoming really good is most difficult with the Vikings. Although their basic strategies are easy to understand, their pro strategies are probably the most complex, requiring more skills and units to be combined.

3. Balance between tactics

Each faction should have many different useful tactics, and most of the time, several viable options should be there for the user to choose from. If a faction is only strong with one specific tactic, then you always play that and the game gets boring. Also, the opponent will know exactly what to expect. So there is not just the balance between factions, but also the balance inside a single faction, where all units and many tactics should be of use.

4. Balance on different maps

When the game is balanced on one map, the balance might be broken on another. For example, in Swords & Soldiers, the Chinese need towers to get mana, so a large map with lots of room to build and defend towers makes them stronger. To reduce the complexity of balancing, we balanced for one particular map (the first medium map) and added the other maps for flavour and variation. In online multiplayer, we only allow for 4 of the 9 skirmish maps, because we think the balance is best on those 4 maps.

5. Early game balance versus late game balance

At the start of a match, you don't have a lot of upgrades yet and your choices are limited. The balance at this point is totally different from late in the game, when both players have upgraded all their spells and units. A balance where one faction is stronger early and the other late is not good: if the early rushes are over, you will already know who is probably going to win. That's pretty boring. On the other hand: having some variation in how fast you can rush does add variation between the factions, so making this completely equal might make the game boring as well!

6. The amount of fun in the balance

This type of balancing is really difficult to measure, but quite easy to feel: some tactics are just lame. Spamming a single unit all the time is really boring, so that better not be a good tactic! The following Viking tactic is an example of how things should be: a very strong combo the Vikings can do is to build Frosthammer units (who do area of effect damage and stun), then freeze a large group of enemies with Snowstorm, and then ram the Frosthammers into the frozen enemies with Rage. Doing this requires skill, speed and knowledge, and is pretty strong, so the player will probably feel great doing this!

7. The amount of luck in the balance

A Chinese player can start out with melee units or ranged units. At one point we had a balance in which, depending on the opponent's opening move, this would mean a certain win or a certain loose. This is balanced: you have a 50% chance that the enemy happens to choose the opening move that lets you win. However, this is based purely on luck and thus requires no skill at all. So even though the faction balance was good at this point, this balance was broken!

A little bit of luck is a good thing to have in a game, though. Players who loose a match tend to feel a lot worse if they know it is entirely their fault. If there is also a little bit of luck involved, then they can blame their bad luck and feel less bad about their skills. Taken to its extreme, luck is why a game like Mario Kart (which features tons of luck through the upgrades) is so enjoyable for beginners: it still lets them win once in a while against better players.

Complexinat0ring!

As you can see, balance has many faces. The biggest problem with it, is that even the smallest change might affect all of the types of balance at the same time, plus it probably affects several match-ups of factions as well. Even for a small change, it is practically impossible to predict what effects it will have on the whole. Therefore, it is incredibly difficult to get the balance right for all of these aspects at the same time.

In terms of balancing, Ronimo's Secret New Game is a lot more complex than Swords & Soldiers, so I am really curious to see how well we can pull it off there!

Since balance is such an interesting and complex topic, next week I am going to talk about some of the pitfals of analysing it, both for developers, and for players and reviewers.