I wish I thought of this sooner, and wanted to share with anyone who doesn't already do something like this.

Balance World is the entire game compressed to a single map.



There's no dialog. No exploration. Only combat.

In Balance World, you walk up to a dungeon, fight it's battles back to back, then receive all the treasure inside. Plus, I have a few quick events setup for adding party members, boosting levels, and spawning certain tiers of gear.

This setup has been crucial for me, given the game's non-linear nature and variety of combat setups. I can quickly play through the game with different party members, equipment loadouts, and dungeon ordering.

It's also easy to add battles at any point in the game. I have a stockpile of saves for different level ranges and simply load the appropriate one when adding new encounters.

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Balance World is simple, and you probably have something similar, but if you don't, consider it. I wish I had this from the start.

I've been working on Notes From Province for 4 years, and during that time, I've gotten much better at making Notes From Province.

Which sounds awesome. Except I've been making the game chronologically. So middle of the game is much higher quality than the start, and the end is higher quality than the middle. And you can't have the start be the worst part of the game. That's when you hook the players. So the solution is obvious. I go back and remake the beginning. But you can't have the middle be the worst part of the game, or else player's won't stick through it until the end. So the solution is obvious. I go back and remake the middle.

If anyone knows how to not get stuck in an infinite development cycle while maintaining a consistent standard of quality let me know. For now, I have three ideas.

Prefer adding rather then remaking
If we add new, better content in between the old, then the average quality rises. I'm lucky with this as the first area has noticeably fewer dungeons than the later zones, creating some gaping content holes.

Define what "good" content is
Some earlier blog posts described a list of rules for making good puzzles and encounters. With something concrete to point to, I can objectively tell if a part of the game is below standard and needs reworking. If it meets the rules, leave it.

Develop with the intention of remaking
Not sure yet if this is a good idea or a horrible one, but I'm developing the rest of the game as if it were a draft. Placeholder treasure and monsters between unfinished cutscenes. Leave out the things that were likely to be remade anyway and once the game exists in it's entirety, come back and fill them in.

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 ;)

There's this great article where the writer interviews top puzzle game developers and has them articulate what makes a good puzzle. Based on their collective advice, I've created two golden rules of great puzzle design. Every puzzle in the game follows the rules, or is left behind.

1) When the solution is known, the puzzle is solved

This sounds like total common sense, but is the biggest cause of bad puzzle in indies and professionals alike.

To help figure out why this isn't always the case, we'll dive into the worst puzzle in the game.



At this point it's been established to the player that moving a black rock onto the off-colored tile will open the nearby gate. The puzzle? The gate blocking the way forward has two tiles, but the player has only one rock.

But don't worry. We're clever. We use the one rock to unlock the top gate, gaining access to our second rock, then we move both onto the bottom tiles and unlock our gate. Good. We figured out the solution in like 10 seconds, but the puzzle is far from solved. There's about a minute of busy work to shuffle the rocks into place.

Another way of wording rule one:
Discovering the solution should take significantly more time than executing it.



Here's a better puzzle designed with the two rules in mind.

How do you get these two rocks unstuck? No idea. But once you figure out, they're basically right where they need to be. Bonus points because the solution to this puzzles involves showing an understanding of a previously learned, but untested mechanic, which is exactly what rule two is about.

2) Each puzzle teaches something new

Whether that means the player is learning a mechanic for the first time, discovering new ways existing mechanics interact with the world, or showing a new level of mastery over a previous skill.

An alternative wording:
Every puzzle of the same type has a different solution.



In this series of puzzles, the player has learned the green vines will wither and die if an undead comes near them.

The first puzzle is clearing the southern vines to open the path further into the dungeon. To solve it, the player discovers that the zombie can be interacted with and controlled by the necromancer party member.

The next challenge is guiding the zombie near the vine wrapped chest on the right. Unfortunately, our zombie is rather dumb and moves in a straight line until hitting an obstacle (sliding ice puzzle style). Here we learn how to turn our zombie with precision using the movable rock to create an impeccably placed wall.

The last puzzle is the chest on the left. How do we get the zombie across the gap? Who knows. But it probably involves learning something not used in the previous puzzles.

Leaving bad puzzles behind

These two rules guide every puzzle put into the game. The few earliest puzzles that predate the rules have been reworked to follow them.

To quote a play tester, "I guess the newer puzzles are slightly improved."

Notes From Province will actually be finished. Well, someday. I took a brief break from game dev, then spent a few months on a side project, but now NFP is back in the spotlight.

I'm just coming from a full playtest of the game, and have one key takeaway: this game is insane. You can't step 3 tiles without running into a new quest. When you got a dozen things to do, in a dozen different directions, you feel stuck. Now the later parts of the game handle this better. You have a set of tasks focused around one area of the world, which open up a set of tasks focused around another area. The early game? Chaos.

Because of this, I'll be going through the game's content and updating the pacing of when it becomes available. The goal is to group stories focused on similar areas of the world and have them become available around the same time.

The next big development task is to take all the plans for the game and throw them out. This game is long. Finished game should take ~20 hours for a player invested in closing out all the side stories and figuring out how to jump to every chest. I'm working on trimming the unfinished content to a minimum so I can actually release the game. I've got it down to Province Town + 3 explorable areas, and 4 chapters of main story.

In terms of general progress updates, 2/3 of the explorable areas are mostly complete and chapter 1 of the main story is implemented, tested, and ready to go.