For those who haven't played the demo, Notes From Province is an open world game focused on boss-like battles. It's structured like this: there are three battles you can take on at level 5, in any order. Beating those three will get you to level 10, which makes you strong enough to take on the next three battles, which gets you to level 15 for the next set, and so on.

Now this sounded like an awesome setup to me at first, but the more the game developed, the more I realized that wait, this is actually horrible.

The first battle of the set is well balanced and engaging. Then you level up. Battle two is a bit easy. No need to pay much attention. By the time you reach the last encounter, you're strong enough to force your way through without even knowing what made the encounter interesting. Despite my best efforts, two thirds of the game ends up being poorly balanced.

Finding an answer

The classic open world solution is enemies that scale with the player. That's fine, but it's not the game I'm trying to build. The best moments in this game are when you discover an enemy far outside your level, get destroyed, come back an hour later, and then do the destroying. I want imbalance, but it needs to be few and far apart. Plus, there's this dynamic difficulty system implicit to an uneven world. If a player wants an easier time, then beat all the encounters in your level range before moving on. Players wanting a challenge can take on enemies from a higher range.

There were a few other solutions I considered. Like having no stat progression at all, with the characters getting stronger by gaining more options in combat. So you'd be rocked by a confusion heavy battle until you found the confusion curing equipment. Another idea was to take an approach seen in the Guild Wars series, where players reach max level quickly and the majority of content is balanced at max level. I'd still get that imbalance in the leveling phase, but all content after would be smooth.

Ultimately, I decided that instead of gaining stats every level, the player only gains stats every 5 levels. This probably sounds like the dumbest solution, but it plays really well into a revamped progression system I'm building to solve other issues.

Balance problems, round 2

Characters choose a passive every 10 levels. It's a great part of character building that can change up the feel of battles. The game is more interesting the more passives you choose, but 10 levels doesn't happen often.

So I bumped the leveling rate. You gain a level or two each battle. I'm using the Yanfly Victory Aftermath screen that shows a cool progress bar towards your next level, and when a character does level up, they get a special screen where they say something cool. But when you level each battle, this aftermath turns into watching seven progress bars fill up, then showing the level up screen for every character. It dragged the end of every battle. That's a mess.

Next problem: character starting levels. It's an open game. I can't accurately predict when players discover and recruit new party members. The best I can do is predict a level range, and have the new character start near the upper end of that range. Like you might find a character anywhere between lv 14 and 20, so he'll start at 18. But you gain a passive at level 20. Two levels isn't enough time with a character to know what passive to choose. So characters can't start too close to a multiple of 10. That's a mess too.

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I wanted to talk about a new progression system that cleans up my messes, but this article is way too long. So this blog post will just be me ranting about the woes of game dev. I'll make another soon actually talking about the new system. Hang in there ;)