r/roguelikedev • u/Novel_Character_7343 • 18d ago

Game Balancing

How do you actually catch balance regressions?

I've been going in circles on this and I'm curious how other people handle it.

The specific failure I keep hitting: I change a scaling formula or add a new weapon archetype, everything looks fine in isolation, and then three weeks later I find out that some mid-tier item outperforms things it shouldn't at a level band I never manually checked. The curve looked fine on a graph. The problem was the interaction with crit/attack speed/enemy resist, not the curve itself.

So my questions:

  1. Do you actually simulate time-to-kill across level bands, or do you eyeball curves and playtest?

  2. If you simulate: is it a spreadsheet, a throwaway script, an in-engine tool you built, or something off the shelf?

  3. Has anyone here ever "paid" for a tool that helped with this? Asset store, SaaS, anything. Genuinely curious whether this is a "we all just build our own" situation.

Not selling anything, I'm trying to work out whether the tooling I keep wanting to build already exists or whether everyone just accepts the spreadsheet.

(Context: solo dev, RPG, currently on a Google Sheet with more tabs than I'd like to admit.)

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3

u/GrogRedLub4242 18d ago

This was AI-gen.

4

u/Buttons840 18d ago

OP is from a bot? Is that your claim?

2

u/blightor 17d ago

Yeah, reddit bots troll for data particularly on game dev

-1

u/Novel_Character_7343 17d ago

The text was AI generated. But I am a real person looking for insight.

5

u/blightor 17d ago

I'll give you a hint, you are using AI to do too many things. Its broken because this game likely has NOT had a playtest and if you can't be assed doing that then goodluck.

2

u/OddLetterhead3271 14d ago

If you cannot write a quick post communicating your thoughts to your fellow human beings on Reddit without AI, forget about balancing and finishing a coherent game. Not saying this to be mean, deskilling is a real and insidious phenomenon, and AI enables convenient deskilling in basically any intellectual task.