Others Game Balance Help

[yawit]

So i'm making a simulation game. You know, the stuff with stamina, money, day phases, the classic stuff. I'm not too deep into development yet, But I have my main assets ready. I'm currently working on the game's core game loop but it made me stop for a bit and think. How do you actually balance these stuff? A lot of similar games I played tends to be pretty grindy before you can get to the sex scenes.

For example, to unlock a scene you may need to buy an item or increase the heroine's affection. In order to get the item you'd need money(a lot of them) so you need to work. Earning money requires energy and often times you wouldn't have a lot left to interact with the heroine to increase their attention. Sometimes you can also increase your max energy but it would also cost you something. You can increase affection by interacting/talking to the heroine but most of the time it doesn't give you that much so you're pretty much encourage to give them gifts.

How do I approach these to find a good middle ground of requiring a bit of planning without being too grindy? If anyone have any resource that could help or any advice it'd be very much appreciated.

 

[Winterfire]

Write a Game Design Document

 

[osanaiko]

to unlock a scene you may need to buy an item or increase the heroine's affection. In order to get the item you'd need money(a lot of them) so you need to work. Earning money requires energy and often times you wouldn't have a lot left to interact with the heroine to increase their attention. Sometimes you can also increase your max energy but it would also cost you something. You can increase affection by interacting/talking to the heroine but most of the time it doesn't give you that much so you're pretty much encourage to give them gifts.

How do I approach these to find a good middle ground of requiring a bit of planning without being too grindy? If anyone have any resource that could help or any advice it'd be very much appreciated.

This is the classic design of early Lesson Of Passion games like "Tori 500" and the original "Living with Temptation".

How did they do it? Well, the design evolved from simpler games. I can only guess there was a lot of playtesting and feedback.

But for absolute certain what is needed is planning. PLANNING. not just winging it, because without experience you can't guess a good answer unless you are extremely lucky.

There is no shortcut - you need to do some specific detailed thinking to come up with goals and tasks for player grind. This is literally part of the "game design" that Winterfire recommended.

i.e. Let's say you want the player to spend 3-5 "game days" before making any real progress (seeing a new event or options). Then to make the progress real, set a design so each "game day" takes 30s to 2 min to get through if you just grind (no new events). Now you can start to work out the number of "romance points" needed to get to a new level, and therefore how many points to award the player in their "game day" grind.

Regarding the game loop - Having various distractions (minor sexy scenes) that waste time without really helping the player progress, and even some "wrong answers" (perhaps trying to get a sexy event too early) that set the player back make it feel more tactical than a simple "click to work, click to sleep" loop. LWT was very good at this.

Also consider that many RPG games have the concept of power scaling - at first level your blunt iron sword can barely kill a goblin. But as you get stronger the rate of progress also increases, so the game puts harder enemies in your way to keep the overall speed of advancement reasonably constant, even if the "numbers" of damage etc are going up super-linearly. You can set the "romance polnts" targets to be similarly increasing in higher steps.

In the end once you have made some plans and designs, the way to test it out is to BUILD it in code. It's a very good idea to do a gameplay-only build - don't add any images/nice stuff, otherwise you will be too distracted and not progress the core game design to the point you can playtest the game loops. Note that this step will force you to think about your game implementation too, which is good to do early before you paint yourself into a corner with poor code decisions.

 

[yawit]

Yeah, the moment Winterfire mentioned making a GDD I immediately started working on it as I only had scattered notes in one .csp file. It's not yet finished but it definitely helped nail down important stuff that needs focus or things that may or may not be removed. And yeah, figuring out how to pace the game definitely needs a lot trial and error.

Looking at the unfinished GDD made me realize that I might be getting way too ahead of myself for my first game lmao. Mental wise, by working on that document, and actually planning stuff out, it felt like i'm actually finally fully "committing" on this and that felt pretty refreshing. I'd definitely have to put more hours in for this now

 

[tooldev]

This is a standard game design effort. Usually one tackles this via a statistical distribution system that uses effort and gain as the 2 inputs. Throw some Gaussian distribution/normal distribution into that and you get the picture. Low effort with relatively high return in the beginning to enable the player and teach a mechanic , scaling towards more effort and less return towards the mid game since the mechanic is now understood. The various points on those curves relate to a char level or skill level. Most games stop at the max point of that distribution and dont scale longer, as players often find creative ways to circumvent your design anyways at that point.