On Balancing Classes and their Possibilities

Welcome! I'm Karie Holmstadt and I am the balancing lead and a programmer for Fate of Factions. Programming wise, I get to work on the core pieces that make Fate of Factions function as intended, such as our game controller and various UI menus. My role as balancing lead involves making sure each class seems comparatively fair with how much health they have and damage they deal against the other classes. For example, if four people were playing Fate of factions they could all play as warriors, or three could play as warriors and one play as a rogue, etc. Seeing as we have four different classes and 2 to 4 people can play at once that is at least a total of 336 possible combinations to consider for balancing!

(Above: Tables on ranking each character based on different characteristics)

The above image shows an early concept of how we considered balancing the classes on paper. We wanted each class to feel unique, to have its own advantages and challenges. This is why we focused on different characters having a better “star” rating in some areas over others (the higher the rating the better the health/speed/damage respectively). “Cooldown” is a timer value that a player would be unable to use an ability, in the case of this graph, the better the star rating the shorter the timer. My main focus tends to be on the game controller class. The game controller is always evolving and getting updated each sprint by me when new features are added into our game, such as new classes, new game scenes, or new functionality such as being able to pause the game. Fun fact, right now the game controller class is more than 800 lines of code long! This week I have been focused on getting our pause menu to function properly. As of this moment it is over half way done! Any player can access the pause menu during an arena fight. While on the pause menu, players can either unpause the game or quit to the main menu. Our programming team is considering adding artificial intelligence and keyboard controls due to SGX now being online this semester. AI would allow people to play our game by themselves, while keyboard functionality would allow for anyone owning a keyboard or controller to play Fate of Factions. Since the game was not originally intended to be played with just one person or with a keyboard, players experiencing Fate of Factions this way will get more of a taste than a bite of what it is like to play Fate of Factions. No promises on what we can deliver, but stay tuned for more information! Thanks for reading, and I look forward to having you raise your own banner high when you play our game online!

Choose your class, fight until you're last man standing, and raise your banner high. Your efforts will decide the Fate of Factions! ~Karie Holmstadt