When does one plus one not equal two?
In games.
[Song: Penguin Cap by CarboHydroM]
Oh, by the way, big thanks to Allison Utterback for doing the guest art this week.
We really appreciate it.
Anyway, that opening question would have been a bit more accurate if I had said,
"When is two not twice as much as one?"
It's a little clunkier sounding that way, but that's the question we are here to sort out.
Because in games, it's very common to have something that looks perfectly mathematically balanced,
but, experientially, doesn't feel balanced at all,
and one of the most common places that occurs is with break points.
Break points are places in your game where a major experiential difference occurs
based on minor mathematical differences.
Let me give you a standard RPG example:
Your level 1 character does a hundred damage per hit.
All the monsters you fight in the zone you're in have a hundred and fifty HP,
and each time your character levels, you do 20 more damage.
So, mathematically, every new level gained should feel the same:
a nice, linear progression where your character is getting a little bit more powerful every level.
But let's look at that experientially.
From the player's perspective,
monsters take two hits to kill at level one, two hits to kill at level two, and two hits to kill at level three.
But then, suddenly, at level four, they can now one-shot every monster in the zone,
thereby allowing them to just storm through the zone, slaughtering everything without ever taking a hit.
This means that the system you built, which appeared fine when you were looking at the player's damage curve in isolation,
actually feels really bad to play.
It feels like you got a very unsatisfying nothing as your reward for your first two level ups,
and then the third time you leveled up, the challenge and the difficulty of the area
just dropped through the floor.
Now, that was a simplified case,
but anybody who's played anything with a progression system in it
has probably experienced that sort of break point.
You've probably had that moment where your agility stat increases just enough
that you suddenly get the first move in every fight.
Or you finally get enough mana that you can cast your biggest spell twice, instead of just once.
Those are break points.
They come from multiple systems overlapping in ways that create an experiential difference in gameplay
which you can't really see if you're just looking at one of those systems in isolation.
But breakpoints are not the same thing as a power spike.
Power spikes are intentionally inserted systems or mechanics
that give the player a larger than normal boost of power when they reach a certain point in the game.
Take Dungeons and Dragons.
In D&D, many of your spells and abilities simply get more powerful at a certain level.
Why?
Because that power spike is part of the interest curve of the game.
The designers want you to be excited about reaching those levels,
and they want to make the things you can do at those levels seem novel and more awesome.
Or, take MOBAs.
Lots of MOBAs make it so that every six levels,
the characters get a power spike in the form of an upgrade to their ultimate ability,
and the designers have built that in intentionally to be part of the strategy.
But, as a designer, it is important to semantically differentiate power spikes from break points,
because power spikes don't happen from the math of your systems.
Those are intentionally placed power boosts,
which make them easy to control,
and easy to build in such a way
that they're isolated from the other systems in your game.
Break points, though, are much more difficult to predict or control,
because that experiential weirdness is coming out of the ways the math of your game interacts,
and thus, it's very common for those to occur by mistake.
The easiest way to prevent unintended break points,
as with most things in game design, is rigorous play testing.
The only way to find these experiential differences is to play the game,
and your play testers are very likely to find them for you.
Heck, if you've got a professional play test team,
they'll often be taking advantage of those break points to speed up their play test cycles.
When working with professional testers, one of the best ways to get more value from their hard work
is to ask them all the little things they do to speed up their test time,
because no matter how many dev hacks you put in there,
a good tester will always find those tiny gameplay efficiencies,
and a lot of times, those break points will go unreported because they're not necessarily bugs.
They might even be legitimate game features.
But, as a designer,
you want to make sure that there aren't any unintentional break points happening in there
that need tweaking.
There's also often some simple automated test loops that you can set up to catch some of these things.
If you're building a stat heavy RPG, you can create a calculator
that'll just test every set of gear at every level with every set of power-ups against every enemy.
And you can tell it to alert you every time some incremental change in values
results in a significantly faster clear time.
Granted, this will work best on numbers heavy games.
For an action game, where success and clear time are more dependent on player skill and choices,
that approach won't be quite as helpful.
But it will certainly help give you an idea for where to start looking.
And sometimes, if you're really careful with their design,
breakpoints can be a great strategic element for the player.
Figuring out what gear to use or how to level your character
so that you can kill everything super efficiently can be really engaging.
It can be a built-in math puzzle for the player.
Or maybe, if the player organically reaches a point where they can just one shot everything in the zone,
and you as a designer know exactly where that break point is,
you can intentionally design it so that the rewards they get after that point become trivial,
subtly signaling to them that it's time to move on to a tougher area,
without having to spell it out.
Figuring out break points can make the player feel clever,
and give them an idea to chase after.
A theory to test, by hunting down the right gear
and spending their stat points in just the right way.
But it is still very, very easy for these breakpoints to slip through unintentionally, so, just remember:
The math is never enough; you have to play your game.
No matter how elegant your spreadsheet might be, you have to remember
that what looks like a small incremental change in the math,
can be a huge experiential change for the player.
And if you find experiential problems that are big enough,
don't be afraid to break your beautiful equations in order to make it feel right.
At the end of the day, how a game feels is what the player will experience,
not the math going on under the hood.
See you next week.
[Song: Journey Through the Caves by Chjolo]