This week as we learn more about balance in battle battle but also just game design in general, this chapter makes me evaluate how to balance my ideas for my personal game project I would like to release down the road in my life. Ill explain more later. First lets talk about why asymmetrical games sticks out to me. In the Jesse Schell reading, it says that these types of games are to give opponents different abilities and resources. In the sense I am using this thought is in my video game idea, I have a playable DPS (damage per second) class called “The DeathMage” aka necromancer , it uses tons of deadly dark magics and poisons BUT has the ability to “rez” other players. Only healers can do this, this class isn’t a healer so how from not only a lore perspective but from a balancing perspective can i balance this dps class out. I think of lowering its total HP, maybe giving the recast time a longer cast time to balance that this class can’t just rez people quickly while in game. 

Next is when designing our battle battle characters, I would like to look into negating as much chance as we can.  The Schell reading points to skill based games are like athletic contests. The player strategizes how they will play. When to use tokens. Most importantly as they play more and more with a character, they can master it and play it well in the competition.

As Dr. S has demonstrated in his video of how to battle battle, I am about to sound like a broken record at this point since i say this word in every DEVLOG but PLAYTESTing is going to be even more crucial in this project. If i were to play a character we made just once or even three times how am I going to know if its balanced? Spoiler alert, i wont and most likely it wont be balanced from half ass play tests. I need to see what works and what doesn’t. Seeing if certain mechanics need to be boosted or “nerfed” is going to be a huge proponent in this project.