Dynamic balance is the ability to maintain balance and control of the body while moving, like hopping, jumping, throwing or riding a bike. While balance skills take time to develop, there are ways to improve them with practice. Following are a few simple and fun balance games for kidsthat can be practiced daily with your preschooler. The Adventure Zone is a wildly popular podcast and series of graphic novels from The McElroy Family. TAZ: Bureau of Balance captures the humor and joy of this world and expands it, allowing you to create your own unique adventures with your family and friends. In TAZ: Bureau of Balance, you and friends are adventurers charged with retrieving dangerous artifacts from.

In 2004, Atari Europe S.A.S.U. Publishes Ballance on Windows. This action and puzzle game is now abandonware and is set in a rolling ball. About This Game The three robots need your help to clear away the virus and allow the returning astronauts to survive in the doomsday world! You will control three different weight of the ball, let them through the flipped game scene;Escape from the suddenly broken ground; Solving imaginative puzzles;Collect and use organs to crack organs. Game details Balance - Tap to shoot balls to keep balance so that it does not fall. You will encounter different cases. Balance the objects for limited time.

When veteran gamers or game designers are playing a game, if they are doing too well or too poorly, they will often comment on the game’s balance. This word is important, but I fear it is often overused. Like the word “fun,” there are different kinds of balance, and understanding what game balance is and why it’s important is what we cover today.

Why are we only covering this now and not earlier (like, say, at the start of the Design Project)? As mentioned earlier, balancing the game is something that is best left until after you have a good set of core mechanics. Balancing a game that is simply not meeting its design goals is a waste of time, and when you change the core mechanics you’ll just have to balance the game again. So here we are, with a work-in-progress that has survived multiple rounds of playtesting, and it is time to take it to the next level.

About the Pace of this Course

At this point, I realize from the comments and some forum posts that many of you are falling behind. As a reminder, this course is going at a brisk pace, and I recognize that many participants may not have the time to devote to this one hundred percent. On the bright side, the playtesting part of designing a game can go at a fast or slow pace; for your own hobby projects, time may not be of the essence, so you can continue to follow along at your own pace.

If you can still keep on schedule, that is great. If you are finding that setting up playtest sessions and modifying your game is taking too much time, my suggestion would be to do things as soon as you are able, and then follow along through the rest of this course a little behind schedule. I’m not taking this content down any time soon, so it will patiently wait for you. The rest of the course will concentrate on the Design Project and there will be no other homeplays to distract you.

I would recommend keeping up with the readings on this blog, however, if you have the time. This will give you an idea of what to look for in your project as you look ahead, and I may make announcements here that I’ll want you to see.

Readings

No additional readings for today. There is plenty of material here in this blog post.

What is Game Balance?

In a two-player game, saying it is “balanced” usually means that one player does not have an unfair advantage over the other. But we also hear the term used in relation to single-player games, where there is no opponent other than the game itself, and any “unfair advantage” the game may have could just be considered a challenge. And then we may talk of individual cards in a game like Magic: the Gathering as being “balanced” even when all players have access to that card, so it does not give an advantage to any individual. What’s going on here?

In my experience, when we talk of “game balance” we are generally talking about one of four things. Context usually makes it clear which one we are talking about:

In single-player games, we use “balance” to describe whether the challenge level is appropriate to the audience;
In multi-player games where there is asymmetry (that is, where players do not start with exactly equal positions and resources), we use “balance” to describe whether one starting position is easier to win with than another.
Within a game, if there are multiple strategies or paths to victory that can be followed within the game, we use “balance” to describe whether following one strategy is better or worse than following another.
Within a system that has several similar game objects (such as cards in a trading-card game, weapons in a role-playing game, and so on), we use “balance” to describe the objects themselves, specifically whether different objects have the same cost/benefit ratio.

Let us examine each of these more closely, and then we will go over some practical techniques for balancing your game.

Balance in Single-Player Games

In single-player games, we use “balance” to describe whether the challenge level is appropriate to the audience.

Note that, by simply playing the game and getting experience with it, your audience will eventually become more skilled at the game. This is one reason why the later levels of video games are usually harder than the earlier levels. (Recall that another reason is so that the gameplay matches the dramatic tension in the narrative.) The change in difficulty over time in a single game has a name: we call it pacing.

There is one obvious problem here that we face as game designers: how do we know what an “appropriate” challenge level is? Sure, we can say that a logic/puzzle game for adults is probably going to be harder than a similar game for young children, but beyond that… how are we supposed to know what is too easy or too hard? The obvious answer: playtest!

There is another problem, however: not all players are exactly the same. Even within a narrow target audience, players fall along a bell curve, with a few that will be highly skilled and a few that are the opposite. In your playtests, how do you know where your testers fall on that bell curve? If you are just starting out, the ideal thing to do is to use lots and lots of playtesters. When you have dozens or hundreds of people giving feedback on your game, you can get a pretty good idea of what the overall ranges are. As you gain experience as a game designer, you will get a better feel for your audience, and you will need progressively fewer and fewer playtesters to give you the same good results. (If you’re starting out but you don’t have the time or resources to do lots of playtests, you can sometimes fake it if you have some idea of where your own playtesters fall on the curve. Do they consider themselves above-average or below-average skill level, compared to the other kinds of people you’re making your game for?)

Even if you have a pretty good idea of how to modify the difficulty of your game and where your target audience falls, what do you choose as your challenge level when the audience is diverse? No matter what you do, your game will be too hard for some people and too easy for others, so this appears to be a no-win situation. If you must choose a single level of challenge, a rule of thumb is to aim for the middle of the curve, as you will get the most people (the widest possible audience) that way. Another way around this is to provide support for those at the ends of the curve, using multiple difficulty levels, handicaps, or alternate rule sets to make things easier or harder.

Balance in Asymmetric Games

In multi-player games where there is asymmetry (that is, where players do not start with exactly equal positions and resources), we use “balance” to describe whether one starting position is easier to win with than another.

Truly symmetric games are rare. We think of classic games like Chess and Go as symmetric, since each player starts with the same set of pieces and plays by the same rules, but there is one asymmetry: one player goes first! If you modify Chess so that both players secretly write a move on a piece of paper and then the moves are performed simultaneously, it becomes fully symmetric (and plays very differently).

This brings up an interesting question: if your game is symmetric, do you need to worry about game balance at all? After all, both players start with exactly identical resources and starting positions and so on, so by

Balance Game