Abilities & Balancing

Designing and balancing abilities for the Overseer player proved to be a unique and exciting challenge. The Overseer had to seem powerful but not omnipresent, providing just enough resistance to challenge the Agents without making the game unwinnable for them.

I began to tackle this issue as soon as we got into pre-production. When concepting the abilities, I helped make sure that they each had a clearly defined purpose in the sandbox. Each ability and enemy also had to be fun for both sides to interact with, whether that be the Agents prioritizing a repair unit or the Overseer dropping fax machines on them as they run and dodge like mad.

As we moved through pre-production my focus shifted from creating new abilities to balancing the ones we had. Through frequent testing sessions, and with the help of the analytics tools that our programmers had implemented, I was able to quickly assess the state of the game’s balance and make adjustments accordingly. I was then able to tweak just about any value in the game through a spreadsheet that I could import into the project. To help with this, I created a “balance map” that outlined all the ways each value would affect the overall balance of the game.