I think I wrote this friggin' thing about three different times, each with a different approach to the topic at hand. What you're about to read may or may not be completely coherent, but I hope the general idea actually stick with you. If something here doesn't make any sense, feel free to shout at me in the comments. I'm going to go and sleep off this massive headache I got from thinking about this topic.

Don't think, people. Don't ever think. It hurts your brain too much. You can quote me on that.

Anyway, this past month saw me doing to battle balance what I did to the art last month. Now that I have a playable game from beginning to end, I needed to get a better feel for how the entire game felt from beginning to end. And let me tell you: I wasn't too happy with it. Especially the mid-late game.

The biggest balancing flaw was how equipment stat changes are handled. The original idea was that every piece of equipment you put on a character should have a dramatic effect on their stats, and even their intended actions during combat. Equip a piece of heavy armor should make most attack glance off of them easily. In the early parts of the game, this achieved exactly what it set out to do. However, the problems came at late game, when you had enough equipment to mix and match with, that stats took on a blatantly horrific amount of fluctuation. With enough tweaking, for example, a character's armor stat could range from 10 all the way to 78! Combine that between 4 stats across six characters, and you can imagine what kind of nightmare it would be to balance all of that. While it's fun to find optimal setups, this kind of fluctuation went FAR beyond what I was expecting.

The only thing I could do at this point was to put in the time to revamp the equipment system and battle balance just like I did with art. So that's what I did. While I was balancing, one system tweak led to another breaking, and fixing that led to another break somewhere else. Each breakage taught me a new lesson, and enough lessons built up over time that caused me rethink my overall approach to PotF's design. Fast forward a month later, and here we are with a revamped system and a new, more positive mentality.

Before we talk about what I mean by a more "positive" mentality, please take some time to watch this video by Mark Brown:



The long and short of it is: when you're developing a game with multiple approaches to solve a problem, like an RPG, it's typically better to encourage the playstyle you want instead of punishing the style you don't. This will allow players to play the way they want to play without being slapped in the face the moment they take one step off from the intended path.

Until recently, I've had "punish bad playstyles" at the front of my mind when designing the difficulty of battles: Enemies will attack allies with low SP to punish spamming that ally. Damage can be reduced to near 0 at max SP to punish players ignoring guard break attacks. Characters will be almost completely unable to move to punish overloading them with armor.

However, over the course of playtesting, I've adopted a mentality that I believe will achieve the same effects without being too much of an asshole to the player. Now, enemies will attack allies with HIGH SP in order to REWARD using your whole party. Damage reduction at max SP will be REDUCED in order to REWARD players who utilize guard break attacks (more on that later). Armor values have been tweaked in order to REWARD experimenting with different equipment loadouts.


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*Side note*

As I'm writing this blog, I keep thinking back to EvilEagles' article about more complex methods of implementing difficulty while maintaining immersion, and realizing more and more how such methods can be applied to PotF.

Punishment-based difficulty fell in line with PotF's hopeless setting; Death was everywhere you looked. Battles against even common enemies could lead to a party wipe if you weren't paying attention. Much like the characters, players would find their path to the end after getting knocked around over and over again every time a mistake was made, assuming they even get that far.

Switching over to a rewards-based mentality can affect the overall outlook of the game's world. Yes, it's still hard for those who don't pay attention, but the excitement over finding a way to survive is a reflection of the character's mentality. The story is all about how hopeless the situation is, and how Aeyr, Mia, and the others react in such a world. Finding solutions to difficult situations gives the player the same excitement as it does the player characters, which makes their reactions in a hopeless world all the more believable.

While I've still got a lot to mull over regarding that article, I realize I've got him to thank for reopening this line of thought that I haven't touched in a long time.

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With that said, here are the steps I've taken towards this new mentality:

1) Streamline stats and lowered armor value changes

There were two big reasons behind this decision. The first was to allow players to tweak the characters the way they wanted to. Since armor and Relics can't be swapped in the middle of battle, the biggest stat alterations were left to weapons and personal gear. This will allow you to switch strategies on the fly.

...And the REAL reason for this is because testing these wild stat changes was a friggin' nightmare, and I wanted to have this game done sometime this century.


2) Reversed targeting algorithm for enemies

Originally, enemies targeted allies with lower SP to punish players who used that ally exclusively. However, what turned out to be the case was players could just use two actions for one ally, then have that ally focus to get more defense. This was a rather timid playstyle that I didn't want to encourage, so I turned the targeting algorithm on its head to achieve the same result by rewarding players who USE allies that they don't want getting hit.


3) Reduced damage reduction at max SP from 75% to 50%

Working rather well with point 2, this reduction means that more damage is going to be inflicted on both the party and the enemy. With such a large damage reduction, players were encouraged to avoid using party members that they wanted to act as a damage tank. In addition, it was practically required to start battles with either a guard break attack or magic to inflict direct damage. While serviceable, it wasn't doing much to put players in a state of flow. Often the extra step felt more frustrating than it did rewarding. With the damage reduction lowered, you can immediately start inflicting damage physically, but you'll just be inflicting MORE damage if you open up with a guard break attack.

Combine this point with point 2, and the result is that the party will be able to take more hits before dying. You'll be given a bit more room to learn from mistakes without it being too frustrating.


With these changes, I hope players are more encouraged the find playstyles that suit them, rather than feel punished for trying to experiment.