Balancing The Endless Game Economy

In this blog post I will talk about the game economy in Endless (which was the topic of the last game design lecture).

The currency in 'Endless' is gold and player's earn these through killing enemies. The only purpose of gold in the game will be to upgrade the weapons that the players have. Normally, when you think of any game out there what usually happens is a player earns money from killing monsters, and whoever kills the monster can pick up the gold (unless they decide to pass on that and let someone else pick it up). In our game, however, things are going to work a bit differently. To keep in the spirit of teamwork, we are going to try a system where the money is shared between the team. Instead of having gold individually for each player, the money will be the team's money. We are working on getting a few things sorted out first before we will go with this idea. Basically, in a multiplayer game, the person who started the game (aka team leader) will get control of the money, and will have to spend them on appropriate upgrades for each member. Again this may or may not work out, but I am curious to see how this will turn out in the end if we go through with it.

Here I discuss some of the points relating to a balanced game economy:

Fairness: With this system it may be possible for a player to get an unfair advantage. One scenario would be the team leader decides to keep all the gold and only spend it on himself, therefore giving him the best weapons against the enemies while leaving his teammates with only the default weapon and no upgrades. In this case the player may get a bit of an advantage in the early to mid game but I believe this will eventually fail as enemies will not drop enough gold for the player to keep upgrading his own weapon leaving him with no choice but to upgrade his teammates weapon in order to stand a better chance. Teamwork is key here in this game.

Challenge: Since the game will have the player losing eventually, that means that as the game progresses, getting the money needed for upgrades will be come harder and harder. There won't be a weapon upgrade that will be overpowered and provide for a clear advantage over everything else.

Choices: I believe the game is a bit limited here for choices since the only way to earn money is to kill enemies and the only place where they can spend the money is on weapon upgrades. Maybe if we have time we will throw in more choices and make the game more fun.

Chance: Earning money in this game will be more chance based. Killing an enemy (especially in the early game) won't be too hard provided that everyone in the team is focusing on that enemy. The money however, will most likely be randomized. Each time the difficulty or "level" of the enemy goes up, the gold drop cap will increase so that they can earn more money later on and it will also limit the amount of gold the team may receive from killing a weak enemy.

Cooperation: I think how the game works speaks for itself here. Only one person controls the money so it will be important for cooperation and the team leader needs to ensure that everyone has the appropriate upgrades so that they are able to support their teammates.

Time: I would say the way it is right now it sits between earning money too fast and being just right. Again players earn money through killing so earning money will not be a difficult task in this game where there are hoards of enemies. However, I believe that the game compensates for this by only allowing players to upgrade in between levels. This will prevent the team from earning money in between levels and makes the upgrade opportunities more valuable.

Rewards: It can be rewarding earning/spending money, as this would essentially lead to rewards in the game in general. The more powerful the characters are, the longer play time they get.

Punishments: If the team does not cooperate and one player ends up losing early on, then the team has essentially lost one person to help them gain income, and the team also has less choices now as they will not be able to spend money on upgrades for the dead person.

Freedom: There isn't really much freedom in the economy in terms of choices as players are limited to spending the money on only the 4 characters and they are only upgrades. However, if we look at freedom as 'being able to buy the upgrade that you want', then the team leader has a lot of freedom as he can choose to upgrade anyone's weapons as he see's appropriate.