balance
2 articles
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Rebalancing a Live Game: How I Broke Veteran Players Twice and Why the Test Was Green
I reworked the balance of my idle game, and a player with a maxed-out tower died on wave one. I shipped a fix with a test, and the same player wrote: "I have millions of HP but can't kill a single enemy." The test was green because it checked the wave number, not kills. A first-person breakdown: why a rebalance is a data migration, which saves to test with, and how to check the outcome instead of a proxy.
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Game Balance Breaks Through Numbers, Not Bugs: Catching Exploits with a Simulator
A tester beat my idle game to wave 199 in one evening, even though everything 'worked'. A first-person breakdown: why balance can't be tested by hand, how to write a player simulator, a stress test for a maxed-out build, and the four holes it found. With a QA checklist.