Balancing a run

Once the battle loop and the four bosses were working, the game had all the moves but not really an arc. You could play a round. You could fight a boss. But a “run,” the thing where you chain levels together and feel progress, that wasn’t really there. Every level felt like every other level.

Balance is the invisible part of the game. If I get it right, nobody notices. If I get it wrong, the game is boring early on or impossible in the middle. I’ve probably spent more time on balance than on any individual mode. Which is something I’ve read other solo devs complain about and always assumed was exaggeration. It’s not.

#The thing I was trying to avoid

I didn’t want a difficulty setting. No Easy, Normal, Hard. Those always felt like the designer giving up and pushing the decision onto the player. I wanted one game, tuned so that a beginner who’s still finding the home row gets a reasonable early game, and a fast typist gets a real challenge later on, without either of them having to pick anything on a menu.

That’s obviously a hard line to walk. It’s probably why most games ship with difficulty settings. But for a typing game specifically, I thought it was possible, because typing speed is already a dial the player brings with them. The game doesn’t have to scale. The player does. A faster typist clears rounds quicker, reaches harder levels sooner, and gets tested at their own pace. A slower typist settles into the early rounds and has longer to learn.

So the whole balancing job was really about making sure the game could handle both without either kind of player bouncing off.

#Pacing

The biggest lever for pacing is how often bosses show up, and how long a regular round takes. I landed on a boss every few levels, and rounds that take roughly a minute or less depending on how fast you are. That puts a full run at somewhere around ten minutes if you reach a reasonable level, which felt like the right size, small enough to fit around something else in your day, not so small that finishing one doesn’t register.

Where this broke in tuning was the difference between “me on a good day” and “me when I’m tired.” On a good day I was blowing through rounds too fast to feel tested. On a tired day the same rounds felt punishing. A lot of the tuning was finding a midpoint where both of those experiences stayed inside the 10-minute window without either one feeling wrong.

#Word length

Most of the difficulty in a typing game is just the length of the words. A five-letter word is a totally different challenge than a nine-letter word. Typos in short words cost you a second. Typos in long words can cost you a whole word and a hit. So a lot of balancing is deciding what word lengths show up at what point in the run.

Early on, everything is short. Three to five letters. You’re getting comfortable. As the run goes on, the word pool widens. New enemies unlock that throw longer words. By late run, you’re typing ten-plus-letter words under pressure. The scaling is gradual enough that fast typists don’t hit a wall, but firm enough that slow typists feel the ramp.

The part that kept going wrong was the handoff between tiers. Every time a new enemy unlocked with significantly longer words than the previous tier, I’d die a lot at that boundary. People who don’t type as fast as me would presumably have died more. So I kept softening those transitions, weighting the word pool toward shorter words when a new enemy first shows up and gradually letting the longer ones roll in as you stay in that tier.

#Defense

Word length alone gives you a difficulty curve but not much variety within a single round. Three enemies with three different word lengths still feels uniform. Defense is where the variety lives.

Every enemy has an attack gauge that fills over time, and when it fills they swing at you. Typing their word is what knocks the gauge back. How much it knocks back depends on their defense. A low-defense enemy is fully interrupted the moment you finish its word; gauge drops to zero, you’re safe until it winds up again. A mid-defense one loses about half and keeps coming. A high-defense one barely flinches; you type the word, and the enemy is still about to hit you anyway.

Late in a run, a single round might throw all three at you: one you can leave alone for a few seconds after clearing it, one that starts refilling almost immediately, one that’s on you no matter what you do. That mix is what keeps rounds feeling distinct even when the word lengths look roughly the same.

The trade-off between “long word, low defense” and “short word, high defense” turned out to be the most interesting balancing decision. Long-word/low-defense enemies cost time to clear, but once handled they stay handled for a while. Short-word/high-defense enemies clear fast but demand you keep coming back to them before the gauge tops off. That tension gives the late game real texture without me having to add any new mechanics.

Balance is never really finished anyway. The numbers will keep shifting. The structure of it probably won’t.