Happy 2023 everyone!
Only a week in and it's been an interesting year so far. I've been stuck on a problem with Nebula for a little while now and I think I might have solved it. The current issue I'm seeing concerns the game's balance. This problem is manifesting in two ways.
The first problem came to light when I noticed that the final scores when playing the game are too high. Now, normally that wouldn't be much of a problem; just adjust my expectations of what a 'good' score should be. However, the underlying problem was that it was possible to make too much progress in the game. The players should never feel like they've accomplished everything there is to do. Finishing all of the objectives should be something you just barely accomplish with no resources to spare. Completely filling the ship tracks should be limited to just one track, not two or more. Filling up more that one tech ladder shouldn't be possible (unless you're playing the blue power, which specializes in gaining tech points). But playtesting the game I noticed that any and all of these would happen frequently.
The culprit there was due to power creep. Without realizing it, I had been slowly increasing the amount of resources available to the player. I added in the objectives, which necessitated adding in rewards for completing those objectives. I tweaked a couple of the tech powers, so that it's not possible to get a power that is completely worthless, but in doing so made them stronger. (A couple of the income powers were like that, if you got them on the last round when income would not trigger again; I changed that so you always get something, even if it's small.) But for each of these tweaks, the players would get a little resource boost. And those boosts added up. The solution was to go through the ship tracks and remove some of the extra resources there.
The second problem is that the ships are not consistent with each other with respect to how powerful they are. Sure, the various ship layouts will never be the same. Some are large, some are small. Some are easy, some are more difficult. But all of them should have roughly the same amount of potential for progress. And I'm not quite seeing that. Playing a few games on each layout and averaging them together, I noticed that a couple of the ships consistently scored higher than the others, and one scored consistently lower. And not by a small margin... we're talking +/-10 points, where the range of 'good' scores I'm targeting for Nebula is around 60 to 70 points. If the difference were just a couple of points I probably wouldn't worry about it, but a ship layout automatically adding 10 to your total is an unacceptable imbalance.
I'm still working on correcting this. I've been focused on the Kraken ship (shown above) so far, as it tended to underperform, but I will be addressing the other ships soon. The Rhox and Xyxzx ships, in particular, seem to have higher than average scores. It might just be a matter of removing some of the candies from the board (looking at you Rhox), or reducing point values or icons in various spots (you're next Xyxzx), but regardless of the actual tweak needed I anticipate a lot more playtest-fix-repeat cycles before I'm done.
Now, I'm very aware that 'balance' is a rather nebulous (ha!) concept when it comes to board games. Many games have certain cards, player powers, strategies, etc. that are known to be weaker or stronger than the others. And while a small amount of imbalance might be unnoticeable or at least ignorable, when an imbalance gets so bad that 'everyone' knows about it, I feel that that detracts from the fun of the game. I'm trying to avoid that, a gross imbalance problem.
And that requires a lot of playtesting. I think over the past few weeks I must've played Nebula solo 50 times. And I'm sure I will need many more tests before I am done.
The good news is that this level of balance tweaking means that the major mechanics of the game are pretty solid. I'm very much hoping that this is the last of it, and soon I will be able to start moving from polishing Nebula as a game to turning Nebula into a product.
Crowdfunding this year? I would like that a lot! I keep saying to myself every year that this is the year to publish my second game, but this time it feels like that might actually be in reach. Here's hoping!
Only a week in and it's been an interesting year so far. I've been stuck on a problem with Nebula for a little while now and I think I might have solved it. The current issue I'm seeing concerns the game's balance. This problem is manifesting in two ways.
The first problem came to light when I noticed that the final scores when playing the game are too high. Now, normally that wouldn't be much of a problem; just adjust my expectations of what a 'good' score should be. However, the underlying problem was that it was possible to make too much progress in the game. The players should never feel like they've accomplished everything there is to do. Finishing all of the objectives should be something you just barely accomplish with no resources to spare. Completely filling the ship tracks should be limited to just one track, not two or more. Filling up more that one tech ladder shouldn't be possible (unless you're playing the blue power, which specializes in gaining tech points). But playtesting the game I noticed that any and all of these would happen frequently.
The culprit there was due to power creep. Without realizing it, I had been slowly increasing the amount of resources available to the player. I added in the objectives, which necessitated adding in rewards for completing those objectives. I tweaked a couple of the tech powers, so that it's not possible to get a power that is completely worthless, but in doing so made them stronger. (A couple of the income powers were like that, if you got them on the last round when income would not trigger again; I changed that so you always get something, even if it's small.) But for each of these tweaks, the players would get a little resource boost. And those boosts added up. The solution was to go through the ship tracks and remove some of the extra resources there.
The second problem is that the ships are not consistent with each other with respect to how powerful they are. Sure, the various ship layouts will never be the same. Some are large, some are small. Some are easy, some are more difficult. But all of them should have roughly the same amount of potential for progress. And I'm not quite seeing that. Playing a few games on each layout and averaging them together, I noticed that a couple of the ships consistently scored higher than the others, and one scored consistently lower. And not by a small margin... we're talking +/-10 points, where the range of 'good' scores I'm targeting for Nebula is around 60 to 70 points. If the difference were just a couple of points I probably wouldn't worry about it, but a ship layout automatically adding 10 to your total is an unacceptable imbalance.
I'm still working on correcting this. I've been focused on the Kraken ship (shown above) so far, as it tended to underperform, but I will be addressing the other ships soon. The Rhox and Xyxzx ships, in particular, seem to have higher than average scores. It might just be a matter of removing some of the candies from the board (looking at you Rhox), or reducing point values or icons in various spots (you're next Xyxzx), but regardless of the actual tweak needed I anticipate a lot more playtest-fix-repeat cycles before I'm done.
Now, I'm very aware that 'balance' is a rather nebulous (ha!) concept when it comes to board games. Many games have certain cards, player powers, strategies, etc. that are known to be weaker or stronger than the others. And while a small amount of imbalance might be unnoticeable or at least ignorable, when an imbalance gets so bad that 'everyone' knows about it, I feel that that detracts from the fun of the game. I'm trying to avoid that, a gross imbalance problem.
And that requires a lot of playtesting. I think over the past few weeks I must've played Nebula solo 50 times. And I'm sure I will need many more tests before I am done.
The good news is that this level of balance tweaking means that the major mechanics of the game are pretty solid. I'm very much hoping that this is the last of it, and soon I will be able to start moving from polishing Nebula as a game to turning Nebula into a product.
Crowdfunding this year? I would like that a lot! I keep saying to myself every year that this is the year to publish my second game, but this time it feels like that might actually be in reach. Here's hoping!
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