Adding balance through advantages

Hello! Over the past week, I worked on adding more ways to gain advantage in the game of Parry-Strike.

During testing, I realized the game was too punishing. As it was back then, basically no moves (except for a successful attack) were rewarded. So first, I decided to tweak the numerical values and halved the amount by which focus (let’s just call it stamina) is decreased when blocking or dashing. Better. Still not good enough.

In my analysis, I saw that my attack action is overpowered. There’s no downside to it. So first, I decided I’d give the defender some advantages for his successful defense.

I added a perfect block — which is hard to accomplish, the timing window is pretty narrow. Basically, if a player blocks an attack just before it hits, he gains a number of advantages:

1. He gains a little bit of stamina
2. And the time needed to charge an attack is reduced a lot.

Then, I also was worried about my second defense option — dash. I want to make dash and block meaningfully different, and I still need to see how are they used by real players… but anyway. Timing advantages. In my game, as it is now, when attack is blocked it immediately stops, but can be started again immediately. But. If the attack hits nothing, it goes for a certain time, during which the attacker can’t do anything. I decided to give players the opportunity to use this window of vulnerability.

Now, when an attack is dodged successfully with a dash, it gives the defender a boost in attack speed, so that the counter attack is faster than a usual attack.

I hope those changes help a lot with the balance of the fight, even though there’s still lots of playing around with numbers.

And I added an unplanned for mechanic to account for a technical issue I couldn’t easily solve. And to make things more interesting. I noticed that even if both players have zero stamina, if they attack each other simultaneously it’s impossible to win. The way I decided to treat this is almost exactly the way I saw almost every game I played for reference treat it: nobody gets a hit. So, when attacks are simultaneous, they clash and instead of decreasing stamina to the opponent, players are pushed away from each other.

I also reward both players with a tiny bit of stamina after a clash, because it’s a rare action and I want it to be enjoyable. And I also want to influence player’s decision making in that way — sometimes clashing might be beneficial, but since it adds stamina to both players, sometimes it’s not.

I’ll go on working on adding more control options, tweaking numbers. I still have some mechanics in my documentation I didn’t add to the game yet, so I want to finish them and then fully focus on polishing everything.