Schmooples' Den! The DA News Discussion Thread

I could write a plethora of axioms around this question but I'll give you the three that immediately jump to my mind:

1) Get on-boarding/tutorials in to the game as soon as possible for gameplay. When we're doing dev and testing out our systems we typically take a mid-game feeling character to use as our default in order to prove out said systems. What this causes frequently is a lot of misdiagnosed balance issues because other people on the team who aren't dealing with combat on a daily basis find the game confusing or too challenging - this is primarily because they do not go through the typical onboarding a new player would (ie. start with basic attacks, add in 1 ability at a time, have time to practice new mechanics...etc). If you force everyone to go through a quick and dirty bootcamp for 'how to play the game' it makes a remarkable difference on the feedback you get.
Also balance bugs suck because they're so subjective - you have to really dig in with the particular person or session to get proper information out of it.

2) Simple is not bad. When first digging in to design there is a tendency to flex creativity and make very complex characters or systems with a lot of moving parts; while there is nothing specifically wrong with those characters you want them to be the exceptions. A simple concept executed very well frequently feels better, and definitely feels more cohesive, than something much more complicated.

3) Somewhat related to #2, Players will find the best return on effort for gameplay so if there is a strategy that takes no effort but yields acceptable results almost everyone will lean on it (I learned this one the hard way with Zither's barrier skill  )


Hope that's in the ballpark of what you were looking for. I don't mind questions as all, I can always just not answer you if I'd like