ABSTRACT
This chapter talks about different options to help make damage throughput more predictable, making it easier for designers to balance the game. In a video game, tweaking combat difficulty can be a daunting task. This is particularly true when designers talk about scenarios with multiple AI agents shooting at the player at the same time. The chapter shows how to avoid them without compromising the player experience and while still giving designers lots of affordances for balancing. In an action game, difficulty level is usually related to how likely the player is to die during a game, or to the amount of experience required to progress through the experience. One way to address the one-hit kill syndrome is to have AIs take turns when attacking the player. This is commonly achieved by using a logical token that gets passed around the different agents involved in combat.
