After numerous playthroughs of the four completed character prologues, we have now completed our balancing. As discussed in a previous post, each completed character prologue (White Mage, Gray Mage, Knight, and Hunter) has a different number of playable characters and that number of characters changes throughout the prologue in all cases except for the Gray Mage who remains solo throughout.
With a dynamic number of characters, balancing was more challenging than usual because enemy strengths could not be evenly maintained across the various prologues but had to be carefully tuned by playing through each prologue multiple times until certain metrics were achieved. In addition, early game balancing is always a meticulous affair due to the large effect of small changes (e.g. increasing or decreasing ATK/INT/DEF/MGD for an enemy can have significant consequences). All balancing was completed on “Hard” difficulty and each prologue had difficulty balancing metrics for the first and second dungeons.
These playthroughs also uncovered bugs that were fixed as well as ideas for improvements that were also implemented along the way. While there is still room for improvement in these prologues (and we have a fairly extensive list of these improvements/fixes for later), we are now ready to move onto designing the game after the party forms from the selected characters. But first, I think we’ll take a little detour to work on the Fishing mini-game for Last Dream II.
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