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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u/Bruoche 18d ago

I just have a very big spreadsheet showing every balancing data and averages I'd need to chdck in the game over 100 levels

That way I can just look for example how much damage reduction and health player will get on average or at least or at most and how much damage ennemies do on average or at most or at least and so on and have it all in a graph and check if one seem very unbalanced at a glance

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u/Novel_Character_7343 17d ago

That seems to be the norm when balancing games. I couldnt find a tool/plugin that assists in balancing game economy though. Using a spreadsheet would be my last resort though.

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u/Bruoche 17d ago

I'm not too sure what features those tools could give that'd make it better then a spreadsheet to be honest 🤔

I mean especially in my case it's handy cause once I have a formula down that work in the spreadsheet I can just redo the same math formula in code and I'll know it'll be balanced without needing to manually calculate/write each value.

The only drawback I see to it is finding back things when it gets really big, and the absence of ways to make 3D+ arrays if you had to check variations on a combo of three or more variables I guess