Behind the Curtain: Balancing Act

At present, Chronicles of Dramarith  I has 32 different characters across a variety of classes. 32 characters with a pretty wide range of stats, skills, and attributes is an interesting mix to try and balance out, so I wanted to talk a bit about my approach to trying to balance a game wth so many moving parts and pieces.

Start with a focal point, balance around them
In this case, there were two characters I had as the sort of balancing points: Alistair, the swordsman who serves as the game's analog to the likes of Marth and Ike (right down to the blue hair) from Fire Emblem, and Justinian, the magic-wielding royal who joins after the first "arc" of the game. By setting them as the two "lords" of the game, it game me a starting point. If I presume that people can have those two characters, and the two characters are usable, then I can use other characters to fill in holes and niches.

There were definitely some pitfalls I wanted to try and avoid, which I've talked about. Horseback and winged units often tend to push games to warp around their strengths, but their strengths are still good to have. I figured the balance, so to speak, was to try and trade the higher stats of foot units against the mobility advantage of horseback units. I'd say that it's definitely something I didn't pull off perfectly, but I don't think it was a huge miss that way.

One's strength, another's weakness...?
I wanted each character to have a different feel from others in their class and in their niche, but to a point. The main aim I had was that I wanted every character to be usable long-term if you liked them and wanted to put in the effort to use them. Besides base stats and growths, skills were also the lever I could use to achieve that, giving each character a unique tranche of abilities that they had over others.

Those were the two main points I wanted to go for: everyone had a unique niche, no matter how big or small it was, and everyone was usable. I don't think I wound up too far from that, though I have had to address several characters who were too weak in post-launch updates. But that's my main goal: some will be easier to use than others, but everyone is usable enough. I definitely learned a lot through the playtests of the game I did (and the playthroughs others have done), but that's to be expected.

Speaking of which, I should probably talk a bit about how I wrote things and plotted things out at some point. That can be the plan for next week.,,

Anyway, I do have a small(er) patch planned for this week, fixing some typos and adding in additional conversations that seemed like good inclusions. I think the weekly patch cadence may wrap up as we hit Christmas, since most of the outlying issues of balance and typos are about wrapped up.

Thanks for playing and reading, as always!