Andrew Rollings and Ernest Adams on Game Design

What Is Game Balance?

Many games are released each year that commit fundamental game design errors. These games are fatally flawed from the outset, and short of a monumental marketing campaign and a small spate of miracles, they are doomed to failure. There are many obvious reasons for this kind of spectacular failure, such as bad coding, buggy software, poor quality control, and substandard graphics.

However, on many occasions, the cause of failure is not so immediately obvious. The game may look okay, sound okay, and even to some extent play okay, but it still fails commercially. One of the reasons for failure (and the one we are going to concern ourselves with here) is poor game design. In Chapter 7, “Gameplay,” we introduced the elements ...