Balance, balance, balance.
Most of you who read this know I work for a small game development company in my spare time called Palestar. Palestar own and develop the niche MMO DarkSpace. This game has been running, in some shape or form, since 2001, and I recently got transferred Development Lead. In a nutshell, this means I oversee the active development of accepted projects that are assigned to the content team.
To start things off, I'll give you a bit of detail about DarkSpace. The game is one of the most unique games I have ever had the pleasure of working on and playing. Unfortunately, it is also one of those incredible games that are plagued with the issues of no advertising, and no full-time staff to work on the game (everyone who works on the game does so for free and in their spare time). Despite these issues, the development team has always strived to make DarkSpace the game it should be, not content with sitting still and letting it die. It's due to the commitment of an incredible few over the many years that the game still exists, and does so in a fantastic manner.
The game focuses on combat between three factions (teams), of which there are many different classes. I say classes, but realistically, you cannot define them as such. There are 9 different hull types, (Scout, Frigate, Destroyer, Cruiser, Dreadnought, Station, Engineer, Supply, and Transport), and although a few of these hulls are specialised, many of them have several configurations that carry out different roles. Each faction have their own sets of weapons that work in different ways and apply their varying amounts of damage in unique fashions. The game is very unique due to this, but it's also one of the hardest games I've ever had the pleasure of balancing in return.
For an example of how difficult it is, lets say I take the "Particle Cannon", and want to increase it's damage. If I tweak the damage it's increased across the entire range of ships due to our usage of level modifiers in the weapon files (each ship hull as a level mod that is inherited by the weapons, we do this so we don't have to manage x versions of the same weapon). So modifying one ship to do something better will often result in the entire range of ships with said weapon doing it better. So when I say that right now we have the most balanced version of the game I've ever seen, you better believe some pretty smart people did the math do make it that way. Looking at the damage, falloff, range, amd reload time graphs is such a time consuming job, but if you want a balanced game, graphs and maths are a must. But math isn't everything...
There are always going to be cases where 1+1=2 on paper, but in-game it comes out as 3 and you have no idea why. You've done all the math, and it adds up, but you jump in and play it and nothing does. In the past a lot of what's been done has been based purely on math and the belief that "if the math is right, then the game must be right". I'll shout this to the day I die : "nothing in games can ever be purely based on math". Any game that has huge balance issues usually has some arbitrary rule that the content designers have to follow, but in turn ends up ruining the balance due to edge cases that aren't covered by the rules.
Game development is 10% math, 90% gameplay, and that's being generous to math. If something doesn't "feel" right, then you go in and you change it until it does. Math is a great way to get a baseline and a starting point, but you never use it as an absolute measurement. That said, if you base a game purely off of gameplay, you have no idea what to change and in what direction if the shirts hit the flan. Maths isn't everything, but boy do you need it : it's the proverbial foundation to our house that is being built upon it. Do the math right, and you'll usually end up with some pretty decent baselines to work your way up from.
Working on DarkSpace is one of the hardest things I've ever done. It's not a degree, and it's not 50 hour week shifts, but it certainly ranks up there with the things that make my brain ache until the wee hours of the morning. I worry how games will continue to grow in complexity and remain balanced as players want and need more levels to gameplay. How do you balance a game? How do you do it correctly? Is there a correct way to do it?
If I knew the answers, I wouldn't have written this post, and boy do I wish I could have been the content designer for pong.