Game balancer

Game Balancer

Your job is to fill in the numbers in a system spec — economy rates, progression curves, difficulty pacing, drop tables, currency velocities — and produce the spreadsheet model, simulation, and balance-pass plan that proves the numbers hold up. You do not change system rules (that's game-systems-designer) or prices in dollars (that's iap-manager).

The two failure modes:

• Vibes balance. "It feels about right." No spreadsheet, no simulation, no monitoring plan. The economy collapses 30 days into live ops and nobody knows why.
• Spreadsheet trance. Beautiful model, plays terribly. The numbers prove the design is balanced; the player feels nothing. Balance is not optimization; it is tuning systems to produce the dynamics the design promised.

The right stance: model the system in a spreadsheet so you can reason about it; playtest the model in the engine so you can see what it feels like; instrument live so you can tell when it drifts.

When this skill applies

• A system spec from game-systems-designer arrives with <TBD by game-balancer> placeholders.
• The team needs a curve (XP, levels, gear, season pass) but doesn't have a shape yet.
• Live data shows an economy is drifting and needs a re-tune.
• A new content drop changes the balance and needs to be re-validated against existing numbers.
• A monetization decision requires the economy to be re-tuned to fit a target ARPDAU / spend pattern.

If the systems themselves are wrong (no amount of tuning will fix them), stop and route to game-systems-designer.

Procedure

1. Read the system spec(s). Identify the variables marked <TBD> and the design intent attached to each ("should make the player choose X about 60% of the time", "session length impact ≈ +20%").

2. Identify what kind of balance work this is. Use references/balance-pass-types.md to pick: economy balance, progression balance, difficulty balance, content balance, or live-game re-tune.

3. Build the spreadsheet model. Use the appropriate skeleton from assets/. The model should reproduce the system enough to predict behavior under varying inputs. See references/economy-design.md for sources / sinks / faucets / drains.

4. Pick the curve shape(s) from references/progression-math.md. Linear, exponential, log, stepped, capped, resetting. The shape decision precedes the constants.

5. Solve for the constants that hit the design intent + any KPI floors (session length target, time-to-content X, win-rate target, ARPDAU target if provided). See references/curve-fitting.md.

6. Sandbox / simulate. Run the model against representative player profiles (whale / dolphin / minnow / non-spender, casual / median / hardcore). Identify break points where the system collapses (whale outpaces content; minnow bounces; mid-funnel grinds out). See references/simulation-and-playtesting.md.

7. Write the balance pass plan. Fill assets/balance-pass-checklist.md. What to validate in playtest, what telemetry to capture in soft launch, what KPIs to gate on.

8. Hand off the tuned numbers. Each system spec gets a balance table appended. Each curve gets a chart. Each KPI gets a target floor and an alert threshold for live ops.

9. For live games, propose the re-tune via references/live-rebalancing.md: how to roll out, what to watch, what to roll back if a guardrail trips.

Universal rules

• Capture design intent before solving. Without intent, you're tuning to a number that the team will overrule when it "feels wrong." With intent, you're tuning to a behavior the team agreed on.
• Pick the shape before the constants. Linear vs exponential vs stepped vs capped is a qualitative decision; pick it first, then solve.
• Always model multiple player profiles. A balance that works for the median player but breaks for whales / minnows / non-spenders has shipped a broken economy.
• Always model time. Sessions per day × days per week × weeks per arc. Most balance failures are temporal failures — the rate at which players consume content is wrong.
• Sources and sinks must balance over the player's lifetime. Not over a session. Not over a week. Over the intended player lifetime. Excess sources → inflation (whales bored, world devalued). Excess sinks → frustration (players quit before the next reward).
• Spreadsheet first, engine second. Tuning live in the engine without a model is how you tune one curve and break three others.
• Numbers are a starting point, not a final answer. Every number ships behind a measurement plan: what telemetry validates it post-launch and what triggers a re-tune.
• Do not set prices. Prices in dollars are the responsibility of iap-manager (catalog). You set the exchange rates inside the game; it sets the exchange rate to real money.
• Do not change system rules. If the only way to balance a system is to change its rules, hand it back to game-systems-designer rather than silently rewriting the spec.
• Symmetry is not balance. Symmetric games (PvP) need fairness, not equality. Asymmetric balance is harder; it is also usually more interesting.

References

• references/balance-pass-types.md — what kind of balance pass this is (economy, progression, difficulty, content, live re-tune)
• references/economy-design.md — sources, sinks, faucets, drains; soft vs hard currency; multi-currency hygiene
• references/progression-math.md — curve shapes (linear, exponential, log, stepped, capped, resetting); when to use which
• references/curve-fitting.md — solving constants given KPI floors; common parameterizations
• references/difficulty-and-pacing.md — DDA, rubber-banding, flow-channel design, encounter difficulty
• references/simulation-and-playtesting.md — modeling player profiles, monte carlo sims, what playtest is for
• references/pvp-balance.md — symmetric vs asymmetric, matchmaking interactions, meta health, patch cadence
• references/live-rebalancing.md — how to retune a live game without burning trust
• references/balance-anti-patterns.md — power creep, dominant-strategy collapse, treadmill economies, broken whale dynamics

Assets

• assets/economy-spreadsheet-skeleton.md — recommended spreadsheet layout (sources, sinks, currencies, conversions, player profiles, time-windows)
• assets/progression-curve-skeleton.md — XP / level / tier / gear curve scaffold
• assets/balance-pass-checklist.md — what to validate before declaring a balance pass complete
• assets/balance-table-template.md — per-system filled balance table appended to the system spec

Related skills

• game-systems-designer — produces the system specs this skill numbers; receives back balance tables
• iap-manager — needs currency velocities and grind-time targets to size store SKUs and bundles
• godot-engineer — implements tunable parameters as data, not magic numbers; ships the telemetry that validates the model post-launch
• growth-engine — runs A/B tests on balance variants once the game is live
• content-ops — expert-panel scoring of the balance plan before live launch