Wanted to share a bit of my balancing “philosophy” since I’ve been making some tweaks to the game recently, and want to make a few more tweaks. Though my balancing tweaks are making Thrive a bit more challenging, and though I do think Thrive should be a bit more challenging, my changes are not “let’s just make the game harder”.
By sharing this, others can provide adequate feedback, point out inconsistencies in any proposal I make to my approach, and question my approach overall.
Difficulty
I think difficulty can be very broadly thought of as the margin of error a game provides a player. Easier difficulties have a higher margin of error, allowing less tight performance a chance to progress, and harder difficulties have a lower margin of error, requiring more strict and optimized performance to succeed. A well-balanced game finds a Goldilocks Zone for their margin of error (or otherwise provides their players the ability to finetune their own margins).
If we look at this incredible Microsoft Paint visual I drew below: the left end represents an extremely relaxed MOE (margin of error), and the right end represents an extremely tight/tense MOE. Red represents where I felt we were, and green represents the Goldilocks Area.
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Because I felt that the MOE was too safe beforehand, I think players weren’t being driven to really experiment enough, or otherwise optimize their cells. Gameplay
This isn’t to say that the game wasn’t challenging at all - atleast for new players, learning the mechanics presents enough of a challenge already. But atleast in more experienced players, there was a repeated ethos of the game not encouraging them to really stick out their neck on a new strategy. I think that is partially why a decent number of players generally play when a release is out, and then wait until the next release to have another playthrough. Another part of that is also because we have some older members of the community who have tried this game for years at this point.
The Essence: Planning vs. “Stumbling Into” Playstyles
Explained in the simplest terms, my approach to balancing recently is a desire to make playstyles require more intentional strategy and adaptations as opposed to just “stumbling” into a playstyle. In other words - if there is a playstyle a player wants, they should alter their organism in pursuit of that playstyle.
I think very lenient balancing puts Thrive in a place where any playstyle is possible and easily accessible, but as a result, there is no meaningful difference in the effectiveness of different playstyles. And thus, no reason to choose a particular playstyle over the other, or minimized differences in part decisionmaking between different builds.
If balancing is too permissive, players have a really high margin of error. A high margin of error isn’t bad at all; the opposite extreme, a low margin of error, also stifles diversity in playstyles to a similar extent because only one or two metas exist. But still, a really high margin of error in Thrive’s case means that there are very few situations where a particular playstyle won’t work. And if the game is balanced to ensure that all playstyles work at all times, then there isn’t much of an incentive for a player to experiment besides their own whims.
I’m obviously broadly brushing over a really lenient Thrive experience - we do have mechanics, like an evolving atmosphere, which means that certain metabolisms won’t be effective at certain times. But overall, I do think it is true that certain balancing items were straying too far in the safe zone.
If we tighten things up to really nail our margin of error, it won’t always be a whim which prompts players to play a certain way - it will be hardnosed strategic decisions, incentivized by the circumstances of a particular save, which make players play a particular way. And if metabolisms are tightened up to have a tight enough MOE to require decisionmaking, but a loose enough MOE to allow creativity, I think we’re in a pretty good place with the Microbe Stage.
Constraints, or the Lack Of Them
I’ve talked about constraints before - in essence, a constraint is a dynamic of sorts which limits players to a specific bound, forcing them to solve a problem contained within that bound as opposed to being able to bring in other tools. I’ve also shared my opinion that I think Thrive is a bit too easy on its constraints: we offer a pretty diverse toolkit, but the problems we present are universal and as a result make these tools behave similarly.
Constraints can obviously be introduced by new mechanics - size-related costs and the environmental events being worked on by Patryk are solid - but even tweaking .jsons can provide constraints. If we tilt the balance towards presenting engineering design problems for the player to solve which vary between metabolisms for example, then I think we’ll end up with some very solid depth for our first stage. As opposed to how it is now, where different metabolisms are just a tool to solve the universal design constraint: ATP.
So in the most recent balancing changes: this is why I made oxygen accumulate more slowly. The constraint the player must face in the Microbe Stage is the timing of oxygen, as well as some slight inconsistency in how powerful it might be on the onset of oxygenation. This is also why I made iron burn quicker: the constraint there is iron’s lifespan, which necessitates a playstyle surrounded around chunks.
Now, going back to the MOE discussion - I don’t think every single thing needs to be tightened excessively. Iron chemolithotrophy has received feedback that the burn rate is a bit too high for example, so that’s a valve I will loosen. But I still think iron should be characterized by its shorter lifespan - thus, my next balance pass will increase iron’s lifespan, but I will try that in combination with altering the lifespan of iron chunks themselves, so that players are forced to be mindful of how close they are to a chunk at all times.
The Summary
So in essence - rather than it being just a thought that the game is “too easy”, my approach is this:
- Figure Out the Constraint. What design problem are we tasking the player to solve?
- Is the MOE too tight/too loose? If it’s too tight, loosen the constraint. If it’s too loose, tighten the constraint.
Next Steps
I will try to post something describing the next balance item I am trying to tackle since a big focus of the next few releases is polished balancing. Here are some items I’m going to be looking at.
I will clarify that:
- My first goal will be getting the thermosynthesis changes which I obliterated in.
- There are more balancing changes we can do, but my focus for 1.0 is on metabolisms since it would have the most implications on balancing.
Iron
I’m hesitant on responding to feedback immediately after a patch since players still are getting used to new strategies, but I have seen atleast three different players mentioning that iron is burning a bit too quick currently. So I think I’m going to try and reduce the burn rate a bit, and will alter chunk behavior in the way I described above. The constraint here we should try to go for is tying activity to chunks.
Photosynthesis
The constraint here is the day-and-night cycle. We have received a bit of feedback stating that creating mixotrophic organisms is rather easy. I’m not completely allergic mixotrophic organisms - they actually are a very common strategy in eukaryotes - but we atleast want the constraint for photosynthesis to be more effective here. I’m going to look at potentially nerfing glucose output here.