Game Mechanics: Advanced Game Design

Chapter 8. Simulating and Balancing Games

With simple games, you can compute the odds that a given player will win without ever actually playing the game. This is commonly true of gambling games that have trivial mechanics, such as blackjack or roulette. With more complex games, especially those that include random factors, you have to play the game many times to find out whether it is fairly balanced. In several of the examples in the earlier chapters, we stated that the chance that a particular player might win or lose a game could be simulated in a digital Machinations diagram. We arrived at the number we gave based on data from thousands of simulated play tests. As you might guess, we didn’t run through all those play tests manually. The ...