How to do skill Balancing for a RPG game ?

cmtanko

[Before starting, I'm sorry if the question doesn't even belong to this thread section or forum as its not about art but the game design.]

Background:
We are making a RPG game, and I am the environment artist + few more task handler.. Anyways, we somehow got problem with the previous skill balancing system. I have no idea about skill balancing for RPG thing, but somehow have to find it and do it.

Main Question:
How/Where do I even start ? There is all this attributes player's attr., enemies , weapon attr. , armor attr, enhancements, special skills... We'd like to make it simillar to that of Dragon Age in terms of skills and balancing.
Do you guys have any idea , suggestion, links resources, tutorial videos ? Anything is hearty welcomed .

Thanks,

Brendan

You start by knowing how to script fluently, because otherwise you're boned.


Firstly, examine what you've got and what can be salvaged. Do you have a baseline of assets you can't really afford (money or time) to replace?

Xzulian

I have no such experience. But I believe it's very important to test, test, test, and test again.

Just give players the skills and attributes you think should work. Then try them on each other. Have a lot of different play testers to try, and ask them to write you about what feels overpowered, and what needs to have more effect.

SlyRipper

That's what I usually do. I get some cool stuff together that I think might work good, and fill in some basic values that I like, nothing special here, just what fits your needs (like do you want to do some xxxx damage later, or rather stay on lower numbers?).

Then it's all about trial&error, test as much as you can, find out if everything works well together and tweak it a bit to make it fit. Then use other people to test it again and get their oppinions of it, you'll fast get a basic solution for everything and some ok values to work with.. you gonna balance it from time to time as new stuff comes in or a player noticed some new stuff that makes it overpowered or whatever.. so balancing is a part that will follow your game nearly 90% of the time :P it's just about testing and adjusting everything from time to time

Calabi

First off is it multiplayer or single player. Because if its multiplayer its more important than single player.

I'm sure you've got all the categories, baseline values. Its just a matter of going through them all and deciding how you want the skills to work around the base values. How many hits you want, whats the rythm you want to be, the progression. I wouldnt worry about it being perfect, just as long as none of the skills are useless it doesnt matter.

Deadly Nightshade

Testing and statistics.

You want to make sure that the stats that are to be balanced can be accessible externally via a script language such as LUA or XML. Don't ever hardcode stats: because you want to exclude the programmers from the balancing problem and have them work on more important parts of the project.

It is then up to the game designer/producer/project lead (depending on studio size) to tweak the stats using the script language and test it in the game. As for the more theoretical parts of balancing I'm sure there's a professional game designer around here who can give you some advice. I don't know much game design myself but I would go for a dualistic approach, balancing things like melee attacks (or attributes) vs ranged attacks (or attributes), offense vs defense abilities/attributes and so on.

Larger studios have the luxary of a QA -department/team so it's usually their job to do the big scale testing and to provide the game designer(s) with relevant statistics: what requires buffs and what requires nerfs. If you are developing for a small studio (or indie) then your best approach is probably the closed beta test phase for getting the relevant balancing statistics.

duke

You will be pushing shit uphill without some form of meaningful analysis. Once you can visualise say, level vs damage, tweaking the values becomes much less of a guessing game. The hard part is coming up with what exactly to graph out, otherwise you'll have situations where a player with 90 fire damage but only 10 blade damage looks powerful on paper, but in the areas he can play, everything is resistant to fire.

cmtanko

Thanks guys,
so, it seems more art than science.
We have started working on it...
What I am doing now is testing player with its appropriate enemy, ie. when fighting Scorpion of lvl 5, I change the player to ~lvl 5 and see if I need to tweak any values..
I am still not using any armors, special weapons or enhancement to make to simple for now... Just going base up for now.
Seems to work for now. Still need lots of testings to get it correct...
Deadly Nightshade , the starts are outside the program i.e in database, not using LUA (not sure why, need to ask the programmer.)
Again thanks for your inputs, I'll let you know how things is going after awhile.