The Number One Educational Resource for the Game Industry
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Overview:
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How does a game designer determine how many Hit Points an enemy should have? How does the designer determine how much damage a player should do? What are some of the fundamental structures of game design that affect this calculation? In short how do you balance a game?nnObsidian's "The Outer Worlds 2" is a hybrid FPS/RPG that contains both guns and leveling-up. This genre mashup posed some unique challenges to game balance and required multiple revisions to NPC Hit Points and player damage during its development. At each revision, some design philosophies became clearer and more focused, while others were discarded.nnThis talk will introduce a design theory of game balance, explain the reasoning behind it, complicate it with genre expectations, and ultimately determine how to make a "balanced" game using Hit Points and damage. Throughout, this theory will be supported with concrete examples from "The Outer Worlds 2."
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