Devlog 10- Mobster vs. Locals

In this week we took aspects from the game Battle Battle, to help create a new card battle based game, but different than its original because it added aspects of group play, and battling against different villains. In Battle Battle the players chose character cards that all have different abilities and roll dice to determine if players take a hit or not in order to battle. In this week we created our own characters and tested them against each other in order to balance our characters. Some characters in class were very over powered and always won their battles. Other characters were too weak and never won any battles. Balancing the game is just tweaking the player mechanics so that no character will win a hundred percent of the time, and so other characters won't lose a hundred percent of the time. In order to balance the characters I made, I first had to play a few rounds with each of those characters, in order to see if they were too over powered, or too weak. When tweaking the game's mechanics in order to balance the game the game designer also has to allow the aspect of randomness to still be present throughout the game. "Randomness itself is neither good nor bad. Randomness for the game designer is like salt for a chef. Sometimes you want to prepare something a bit salty. Sometimes adding salt only hurts the dish."(Kluger). I found that If you add to many rules or abilities to the characters it takes some of the randomness out of the game, and creates an imbalance between characters. Most of the randomness or chance in the game battle battle comes from the different characters and their abilities they can use when rolling a dice, and when you fix the randomness of the game, it can quickly become unbalanced. For example, during the character testing, a character was made with the ability to gain back health points when rolling either a 1, 3, or 6 and created an imbalance in the game play because it was regenerating health or hitting your character every time it rolled. I found that this week helped prepare me for what was coming next because there was so much balancing to do with making characters and villains.