Are you an EPFL student looking for a semester project?
Work with us on data science and visualisation projects, and deploy your project as an app on top of Graph Search.
Concept
Game balance
Summary
Game balance is a branch of game design with the intention of improving gameplay and user experience by balancing difficulty and fairness. Game balance consists of adjusting rewards, challenges, and/or elements of a game to create the intended player experience.
Game balance is generally understood as introducing a level of fairness for the players. This includes adjusting difficulty, win-loss conditions, game states, economy balancing, and so on to work in tandem with each other. The concept of game balance depends on the game genre. Most game designers agree that game balancing serves towards providing an engaging player experience, especially through a meta.
Game balance is commonly discussed among game designers, some of whom include Ernest Adams, Jeannie Novak, Ian Schreiber, David Sirlin, and Jesse Schell. The topic is also featured in many YouTube channels specializing in game design topics, including Extra Credits, GMTK and Adam Millard.
Player versus player (PvP) describes games that feature a competition between players. PvE is an acronym for player versus environment, where players instead compete with the environment and non-player characters (NPCs).
Co-op is short for "cooperative" and refers to PvE and PvP games where you can work with other players.
Game elements are things that appear within a video game that contribute to the gameplay experience. In most game design frameworks, game elements are categorized into groups to help describe their roles in the games. A game element refers to anything ranging from a player's special ability to the relations between different game mechanics in a game.
Game mechanics are constructs that let the player interact with the game world. They define the goal, how players can achieve them and how they cannot, and what happens when they try. These would include challenges, competitive or cooperative gameplay, win-loss conditions and states, feedback loops, and how they relate to one another. Like game balance, the terminology behind game mechanics can vary depending on the designer or the resource's author.
Official source
About this result
This page is automatically generated and may contain information that is not correct, complete, up-to-date, or relevant to your search query. The same applies to every other page on this website. Please make sure to verify the information with EPFL's official sources.