Developing Heroes' Blunder has been done in a goal-oriented manner. Each stage set to be growing on previous work to become what it is today. The issue with this approach is that there is no way to truly tell if the game will "feel" right, or be balanced enough to be an enjoyable experience for the target audience.

There are two ways this can go:

1. Overpowered enemies/Underpowered Player
2. Underpowered enemies/Overpowered Player

Finding the balance between is quite a process, requiring a lot of extra playtesting. The struggle with that is the developers known too much about how everything operates "under the hood" to get a clear perspective of how our games are perceived by players. As developers it's easy to focus on "just the numbers", however the flaw in that approach is that sometimes the numbers are deceptive and players will approach playing our games in ways that we had never considered.

This disparity can be caused by many factors, however the most common that I have come across would be expectations of player perception to mechanics vs their actual perception of the mechanics.

Here are several questions that could help with detaching from the developer mindset to the player mindset:

• Did we make the mechanics clear enough to the player?
• Is there something confusing about a system that we designed and developed?
• Is this system too complicated?
• Is there enough visual feedback?
• Is there too much visual feedback?
• Is there enough audio feedback?
• Is there too much audio feedback?

With Heroes' Blunder, our heavy attack was deemed practically useless by almost all of the people who had played early builds. Logically the numbers didn't seem too out of touch for damage output: 1.5x base damage. What other factors could possibly be weighing down the feature? Let's examine the math:

If you simply do the math, you can see that there are issues immediately. Less enemies can be hit, 3x the length of the attack, same knockback effect and only 1.5x damage. That's not even to mention that you're also exposing yourself to attacks from your enemies for that entire duration of your attack for the heavy attack. As developers, we learned to time our strikes and become nimble when using them, however this play style was not immediately obvious to players.

We approached some numerical changes to bring the heavy attack into line mathematically with the light attack as follows:

Immediately you can see from the changes that mathematically the attack should feel more useful, however it still did not. To solve this, we decided to bring one of the favorite augments into the fray: Wind Whetstone. Originally this augment affected both light and heavy attacks, providing the ability for the player to strike at range. Moving this ability to only operate on a heavy attack, along with the mathematical changes provided the push that was needed to make heavy attack desirable to the players.

author: Clinton Butler
Posted on 7/14/2023