Balance This Game!

A whimsical strategic sim about balancing an MMORPG.

Hey intern!

Thanks for joining our studio for an 8-week summer internship. We just launched a new MMORPG, but we don't have anyone with the game design skills to balance it!

Can you make our players happy?

Tweak everything from enemy health and spawn rates to aggressiveness and gold drops. Don't worry whether you're making the right choices or not, the players will tell you how they feel about it!

8 Campaign Levels and an Endless Mode

Try to beat all 8 weeks of your summer internship or see how long you can last in Endless Mode!

About

This game was developed in 6 weeks for Devtober 2021. If you have questions, comments, or feedback, please let me know! For every $50 this game earns, I will develop more to it based on popular suggestions.

Accessibility Features

• Colorblind-friendly: No information is presented by color only
• Deaf/HoH-friendly: No information is presented by sound only
• One-click mouse: The entire game can be controlled with a single-click mouse
• Time control: Options to pause the game at any time to play at your own pace
• Very Adjustable Difficulty: Options for fine-tuning difficulty in two ways with in-game explanations
• Slow mode: Option to reduce the game speed to 25%

Controls

• Camera Pan: right click + drag or WASD or arrow keys
• Camera Zoom: mouse scroll or +/- or E/Q
• Interact: Click on stuff!
• Double/half values: shift + click or right click
• Toggle pause: spacebar (or click icon in upper left)
• Toggle game speed: tab (or click icon in upper left)

Vote for New Features!

For every $50 this game earns, I will develop more to it based on popular suggestions. Comment below with what you'd like to see! These ideas have already been proposed:

• Player types - different players have different personalities
• Shops - players can purchase weapons, gear, or consumables to help them in battle
• Tycoon system - earn income to buy player-recruiting advertisements, fix bugs, add new enemies, and more
• Leaderboards for Endless mode
• More levels, player sprites, and enemy types

Changelog

v1.0.1

• Fixed an issue causing the Mac version to not open properly
• Added install instructions for all platforms

Release - v1.0

New

1. Added a Back button to Boss Brianna dialogs
2. Added options to adjust game difficulty via the rate of player joins and churns
3. Added a bunch more sound effects!

Improved

1. Optimized code for better performance
2. Improved logging for future refinement
3. Updated the Summary scroll UI
4. Updated fun details text on the Daily Report
5. Added new loading screen tips
6. Various balance changes, especially to Endless mode

Bug Fixes

1. Fixed visual display of bird’s-eye-view icons
2. Tons of minor bug fixes!

v 0.11

New

• Added Slow Mode to the Options
• Added Weeks 5-8 of the Campaign
• Added Endless Mode
• Added Back button to the Level Select menu
• Added a dungeon control to add and remove spawned enemies
• Added variety to the background textures
• Added more sound effects and background music
• Added more animations when things spawn and despawn
• Added DPS to the player’s observable stats
• Added battle length to the enemy’s observable stats
• Added a loading screen
• Zooming out far enough now shows bird’s-eye-view icons

Improved

• Made balance changes to various aspects of fun and spawn rates
• Enemy variety is now measured only by enemies actually encountered
• Enemy value is now measured only by enemies actually encountered
• Fixed the min and max axis values of Daily Report graphs to use standard ranges
• Increased the range of zooming out
• Removed debug graphs from Daily Report
• Updated the UI of the Daily Report
• Updated the UI of the Week Finished message for clarity
• The Summary Scroll now uses the same scale (-3 to 6) for all bars to more clearly show values
• Improved tutorial clarity
• Campaign weeks now finish as soon as you reach 50 players
• Characters now have personalized and situational mumble sounds

Bug Fixes

• Fixed a bug causing Daily Report graphs to show good values as red
• Fixed a bug with certain sound effects
• Fixed a bug with constraints not properly constraining
• Fixed a bug with the visual display of tooltips

v 0.10

• Uploaded to itch.io!