Designing a “balanced” strategy game

I’m going to talk about game balance specifically in the context of a video game that I made. You can play this game for free in browser, or pay for an expansion. But statistically most of you have not done that, and I’m not telling you to try it. To serve this discussion, I will assume that the player has zero knowledge, and is not interested in playing the game. (I also wrote a design post-mortem, but that assumes you’ve played it.)

In a strategy game, the intuitive meaning of “balance” is that when the player is presented with several options, the options are roughly equally strong. But that’s not exactly right. If every option were equally strong, then player choices wouldn’t matter very much. So the way I think of it, balance is not the end goal, it’s just a means to an end.  The true objective is to present the player with interesting non-trivial choices.  If one option straightforwardly dominates the other options, then player may eventually figure it out, making the choice trivial.

That concludes my context-free discussion of game balance. Balance is a context-dependent idea, and it can be more deeply discussed in the context of a specific game or genre.
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Thoughts on maintaining a game diary

I’ve been maintaining a video game diary since 2021.  I post it publicly on my pillowfort.  It is not the only media diary I maintain, I also review books (though I read very slowly).  Media diaries are very rewarding to maintain, I can wholeheartedly recommend it.  Sharing the diary publicly (to a small number of readers) is also rewarding, but in a more complicated way that I don’t necessarily recommend.  It challenges me to reconcile what I want from the diary, and what readers might get out of it.

For comparison, I’d like to discuss a couple game diaries maintained by public figures.  Gaming youtuber Razbuten has a diary on a second channel, titled “Games I played in [month]“.  Dark Souls youtuber Iron Pineapple has a series “Souls-like games you’ve never heard of” where he plays hundreds of games that could conceivably be described as “souls-like”.  Immediate caveat: both of these series are commercial products.  The youtubers make money off of them.  So I’m taking each of these series as a reflection of what viewers/readers like to see in a game diary.

The primary answer is reviews.  Recommendations.  Curation.  Discovery.

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War mismanagement, in Helldivers

Helldivers 2 is a game that takes a significant amount of inspiration from Starship Troopers, being basically a satire of fascist propaganda. Players take the role of Helldivers, who fight on the side of Super Earth in a galactic war. Super Earth’s goal is to spread liberty Managed Democracy. Managed Democracy is basically a totalitarian government where an algorithm votes on people’s behalf, allegedly based on a prediction of how they would vote.

But where Starship Troopers is a short self-contained movie, Helldivers 2 is a game that people pour hundreds of hours into. It can’t just be a satire of fascist propaganda. It can’t be any single thing. There are many narratives that emerge from it, some of which are at tension with each other. For example, in the interpretation of Starship Troopers it is possible to argue that the bug aliens did nothing wrong, and the humans are the aggressors. On the other hand, Helldivers doesn’t lend itself to such a straightforward interpretation, because there are many clear examples where the aliens are the aggressors.

So I’d like to explain a grander emergent narrative that took me months to understand. It’s a narrative about how players are kept in the dark, and how this leads to a mismanaged war that wastes billions of lives.

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That indie game money

If a game is on Steam, it’s possible for a public observer to estimate how much money it made. The thing to look at is the number of reviews. There’s a fairly predictable ratio between the number of sales to the number of Steam reviews, about 30:1. Then you can multiply by the game price (accounting for discounts). Subtract 30% for Steam’s cut (or a smaller cut if the game was profitable enough). And if the game made under $1000, subtract $100 for Steam’s listing fee.

Let’s go through an example. Hollow Knight: Silksong currently has 394,000 reviews. That implies about 12M sales on Steam alone. Each sale is $20, and we’ll assume an average discount of 15%. In total that’s $200M revenue. For such a large game, Steam only takes a 20% cut, leaving the developers with $160M. Now, divide that among three developers over the course of 7 years of development, and the implied annual salary of each dev is $7.7M.

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Bad Puzzles

What is the difference between a puzzle and a real world problem? A puzzle is devised by someone, generally with the intent of making a pleasant experience for the solver. In contrast, a real world problem is not guaranteed to have a solution, not guaranteed to have a feasible path towards a solution, and is not guaranteed to be pleasant to solve.

Here is a simple math puzzle. Can you design two six-sided dice whose sum follows the same probability distribution as 2D6, but with different numbers (all positive integers) on their faces? Classic, totally possible.

Here’s a simple real world physics problem: Can you estimate Earth’s equatorial bulge from its rotation speed and gravity? I thought I could estimate this using geometrical considerations, but that gives the wrong answer. The correct solution must account for the gravitational field of the bulge itself, which can be calculated by decomposing it into spherical harmonics. Nobody wants to do that.

Puzzles do not always succeed at being enjoyable. Sometimes you waste a lot of time on a puzzle, and then when you look up the solution you think, “I was never going to get that one.” For example, one time I picked up a puzzle box on a friend’s shelf, despite my friend’s insistence that the puzzle was stupid. After messing around a bit, he showed me how to open it: he slammed it hard on the table to shake a magnet loose. I was never going to solve that one, because I happen to have reservations about slamming potentially delicate objects that do not belong to me.

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What’s next in game dev?

So I’m finally done with my video game. What’s next? Should I make another?

I will definitely make a second game. One of my brothers has long been interested in making video games, but never found the motivation to start. So I offered to collaborate with him and show him how to use the game engine. Then I showed him my list of game ideas, and we’re making the very smallest idea on the list.

After that, who knows?
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My game released

My game, Moon Garden Optimizer has finally released on Steam!

moon garden optimizer capsule

If you follow my blog, you may be aware that I have already made the game available for free on Itch, and as a Steam demo. The full version has a small price tag, but includes twice as many plants, and additional polish.

Moon Garden Optimizer is a strategy game where you manage a tiny garden to produce oxygen for moon habitats. It has no RNG and supports unlimited undo, much like a puzzle game. It’s mostly low pressure, but quite difficult to optimize. It doesn’t fit into any existing genre.

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