Thursday 23 September 2010

Playtesting Teemu v1.21 day 2

After fixes I still found one bug, but it's not fatal. You can enter the border exit with > by standing on it.

I think there is no need for more food now when the spawning is actually working. The cellar seems to be little crowded sometimes, maybe less monsters there.

When developing a roguelike there are going to be balancing issues. For instance how to determine the amount of total food items and how to distribute them in levels so that the food clock doesn't become too difficult or too easy? A scientific way could be count how many turns a level takes to solve and calculate the food consumption per level, then planning food distribution based on that data. Or you could just playtest the game to see what happens.

However it's difficult to determine the amount of turns per level, because the number of enemies is changing etc. Even the random placement of objects gives different results. When you design a static (non-random) world balancing is much easier, because you can make detailed plans how to distribute items and monsters.

One way to solve this is look at the player's food situation and create more food items when entering a new level, but it could then become too easy if the player realizes that it's going to happen.

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