Playground Construction Diary: It's a balancing act

Howdy! ːmyfrogː This week’s Playground Construction Diary is all about some of the balance changes we’ve been playtesting over the past month or so. The Raddest Rewards, Biggest Balance & Sickest Synergies update comes out next Monday on 6th of July, it’s almost here!

What the sticker reward system doin'?

Our old reward system was pretty simple, but it had some flaws. Each sticker had a weight we could assign to it, which increased the chance it could show up in rewards and events. We could also increase the weight dynamically based on what type of stickers you already had in your deck. This way of handling it worked for a good while.

But then we kept adding more and more stickers to the game, which meant the drop chance of an individual sticker could be quite a bit different, depending on how many stickers you have unlocked. Even if the stickers of your deck’s main theme were more weighted, the effect would diminish because there were more stickers in the pool. Which led to the sticker rewards being more random than we wanted to.

It was quite cumbersome to manage, so we decided to rework it!

After the changes, the reward system’s weighting is more based on the type of stickers. We’ve also added a rarity to each sticker, so we can make more fine-tuned changes more easily. The process of rolling a reward looks something like this:

• roll sticker’s rarity

• roll which type of sticker

• roll which exact sticker within the type

The different sticker types can get prioritized depending on what you already have in your deck. The stickers in your sticker book are also included but they don’t count as heavily as the stickers on your cards. We can set these weights very easily so it’s much more manageable to tweak things than our old system, and we can still weigh the stickers within each category for more fine-tuned control.

The new system is not perfect yet and we will continue to improve on it! But it’s very much a step in the right direction.

Tuning down OP stickers

There were a couple of stickers that stood out a lot in the game, namely the Knight, Blue Troll and Dragon stickers. We’ve made some adjustments to them in order to make them feel less like you have to pick them if you can because of how good they are.

Knight and Blue Troll are similar in the way that they scale really well based on how many other sticker effects there are on a card. Both of these stickers were a little too good, because if you could get either one or a couple of them, you could very easily craft a single card that stomps every opponent in the game.

For the Knight, we’ve reduced its star generating potential a little bit when stacking multiple Knights, but improved its shield token generation. We wanted to make the shield option more viable, since before you would almost always stack the star generation of the sticker as high as possible without thinking about the shields.

Next up, the Blue Troll. It still gains stars based on how many sticker effects are below it on a card, but we’ve changed how the STOP mechanic gets applied. Before, the STOP could only happen after the troll activates, and the STOP chance could be reduced by stacking more Blue Troll stickers. Now the STOP chance is applied on each sticker activation after the troll, and the STOP chance doesn’t get changed by stacking more trolls on the same card.

The Dragon.. Oh the Dragon. We saw a lot of feedback on it when we launched into Early Access, especially when players ran into a certain character wearing a dragon costume. But we also saw feedback that in the hands of the player, it also felt too powerful. It is a really strong effect, but we didn’t want to get completely rid of it or diminish it too much, so we added a downside to it. The Dragon will still remove all unprotected tokens and stars, but it also now has the STOP keyword and ends your turn after it finishes activating.

Studying the way of the fish (and other themes too)

The long playtest we held for this update gave us the perfect opportunity to make changes we’ve been wanting to try on different sticker themes! Since we could iterate on the changes and get feedback along the way from our playtesters.

For example, we’ve done quite a bit of changes to the Fish sticker theme. The theme felt like a bit too much like playing a bug deck with just different numbers. The fish token generation also relied on bugs, which steered you into building a fish-bug hybrid deck. Broadly speaking, we made changes to strengthen fish deck’s core identity with these goals in mind:

• Compared to bugs, fish should have slower but more rewarding build ups

• A pure fish deck should feel like a viable choice instead of always going fish-bug hybrid

We also changed the way fish tokens grow in number on their own at the end of turns. Previously, having a bug token present would increase the number of fish being added. Now, the number of fish being added scales up depending on how many fish are already present, so it encourages building up to a much larger number of fish tokens.

By getting rid of the bug dependency of the fish theme, we could also switch out the starting toy of the fish starter pack, since it was the same bug container as in the bug starter pack. We’ve also tweaked the starter pack’s stickers and added new fish stickers, so the starter pack should feel like it’s more focused on the fish theme:

We’ve made a bunch of changes to other themes too! The new hybrid stickers have really helped some themes which were a bit lacking before, like the flower theme. There’s going to be a lot of new things to discover in the new update.

Difficult opponents: this is an intervention

The long playtest has been really helpful to get feedback on the opponents! We’ve made quite a lot of adjustments, for example to Luna, Sofiya, Neung, Bobby & Bonnie, Leonardo, Fruits Daniel, and so on. There’s still work to do on the difficulty balancing of different opponents, but the outliers shouldn’t feel as big as before now! There still might be some opponents that feel more difficult than others since it’s tough to get it just right, and different types of decks have their own strengths and weaknesses.

Making changes on stickers can sometimes have unexpected results for the opponents too! For example, Tiger Elias suddenly became way more difficult during the playtests because of the changes we made to the fish theme. He became a menace, so we had to nerf him quite a few times because he was bullying us… ːmysadfrogː

The best is yet to come

There's still work left for us when it comes to balancing different aspects of the game, we're going to keep at it on our road to 1.0 release. Keep the feedback coming, it helps us a lot! We'd also like to thank our playtesters for giving us the chance to do (sometimes crazy) experiments and helping us make the game even better. ːmycrabː

Until next time, see you in the Raddest Rewards, Biggest Balance & Sickest Synergies update!