Game Balancing
How do you actually catch balance regressions?
I've been going in circles on this and I'm curious how other people handle it.
The specific failure I keep hitting: I change a scaling formula or add a new weapon archetype, everything looks fine in isolation, and then three weeks later I find out that some mid-tier item outperforms things it shouldn't at a level band I never manually checked. The curve looked fine on a graph. The problem was the interaction with crit/attack speed/enemy resist, not the curve itself.
So my questions:
Do you actually simulate time-to-kill across level bands, or do you eyeball curves and playtest?
If you simulate: is it a spreadsheet, a throwaway script, an in-engine tool you built, or something off the shelf?
Has anyone here ever "paid" for a tool that helped with this? Asset store, SaaS, anything. Genuinely curious whether this is a "we all just build our own" situation.
Not selling anything, I'm trying to work out whether the tooling I keep wanting to build already exists or whether everyone just accepts the spreadsheet.
(Context: solo dev, RPG, currently on a Google Sheet with more tabs than I'd like to admit.)