Designing Adaptive Difficulty and Stat Balancing in Wavebreaker Chronicles

When designing Wavebreaker Chronicles, my primary goal was to create a system that balanced difficulty dynamically while keeping players in the flow state. This meant crafting a game that felt fair, challenging, and engaging throughout. I wanted the difficulty to adapt seamlessly to the player's performance while providing an easy way to balance and test the system. Here's how I approached this and the lessons I learned along the way.

The Foundation: A Normalized Stat System

To keep the balancing process straightforward, I built the core of the system using normalized values between 0 and 1. Each stat—like health, move speed, attack damage, and cooldowns—was controlled by these normalized values, which acted as a bridge between the game's adaptive difficulty and its stat ranges.

The normalized system worked like this:

Each stat had a min and max range defined in a CharacterStats ScriptableObject.
The adaptive procedure used a normalized difficulty value (normValue) to interpolate between the minimum and maximum values of each stat using Mathf.Lerp.

This system allowed for fine-grained control over how enemies scaled in difficulty, making it easy to adjust how "hard" a difficulty setting felt without requiring manual tweaks for every enemy type.

The Adaptive Procedure

The adaptive procedure was the heart of the system. It dynamically adjusted the game's difficulty based on player performance:

Metrics for Adjustment: Difficulty increased with every three kills and decreased upon player death.
Flow State: The system aimed to find the player's "perfect difficulty"—the point where the game felt challenging but not frustrating.
Caps for Each Chronicle: Each wave, or "Chronicle," had a difficulty cap to prevent players from jumping too quickly into the hardest settings.

This approach ensured the game adjusted intelligently to player skill, keeping the experience engaging while allowing room for progression.

Integrating Stat Progression and XP

To complement the adaptive difficulty, I added a persistent progression system:

Players earned XP for killing enemies, which carried across the four Chronicles.
Leveling up increased player stats, mirroring the enemy stat progression and maintaining balance.

However, this introduced an unexpected issue: the game felt too static. Because both the player and enemies scaled at similar rates, the gameplay experience didn’t evolve meaningfully between levels. While the stats were balanced, the progression lacked the excitement of emergent gameplay.

Adding Variety: Bosses and Special Abilities

To address the lack of variety, I introduced bosses and collectible special abilities:

Bosses: These enemies broke the rhythm of regular waves, adding unique attack patterns and requiring players to adjust their strategies.
Special Abilities: Players could collect and equip up to three abilities per playthrough. This ensured each Chronicle felt distinct, with new combinations of powers keeping players engaged.

These changes added depth to the gameplay, making progression feel more dynamic and giving players more reasons to adapt their strategies.

Challenges and Lessons Learned

Balancing Stats vs. Gameplay Variety:
- While the normalized stat system made balancing straightforward, it highlighted the need for more gameplay variety. Stats alone couldn’t create engaging experiences; enemy behaviors, attack patterns, and player interactions were just as important.
The Limitations of Simple Systems:
- The system worked well for creating generic enemies with appropriate difficulty levels, but without interesting patterns of attack or meaningful player decisions, it struggled to maintain long-term engagement.
Iterating with Player Feedback:
- Initial feedback revealed that players didn’t feel much of a difference as they leveled up, prompting the addition of bosses and special abilities. Iteration based on feedback was key to refining the experience.

Conclusion

The adaptive difficulty system in Wavebreaker Chronicles succeeded in creating a balanced and scalable experience. By normalizing stats and tying them directly to the adaptive procedure, it was easy to test and adjust the difficulty for different types of enemies.

However, balance alone isn’t enough. Meaningful variety, player agency, and emergent gameplay are just as critical to keeping players engaged. This system laid a strong foundation, but it was the addition of bosses and special abilities that brought the gameplay to life.

For anyone designing adaptive systems, my takeaway is this: balance is the starting point, not the destination. The real magic happens when mechanics interact in unexpected ways to create moments of excitement and challenge.

Have a android phone? Want to see what im on about give it a play. https://jay-a-hunt.itch.io/wavebreaker-chronicles