April 6th, 2021 Livestream

Snutt & Mark Talk: How do you make decisions on Balancing?

https://youtu.be/F-XJA1J40wo

Topics

• Coffee Stainers > Mark
• Features > Crafting > Recipes
• Satisfactory Updates > Released > Satisfactory Update 4

Transcript

right right so so like how do you actually decide on like specifically balancing like how do you how do we make decisions regarding balancing because like that feels like what we just talked about it's so hard because it can apply to so many different aspects of both who are playing the game but also like what how that affects all the production lines so like when when when what is that institute's that like I want to change how this thing the recipe for this thing specifically what are you looking for when you decide that like you want to change the ratio of a recipe or something like that that really depends what we're looking at generally when we start making a recipe we we start with a vision for it so it's what is the purpose of the recipe right like how how difficult is it supposed to be relative to the recipes around it is it supposed to kind of be a bump in difficulty or or drop and then we look at also what the challenge is as part of that vision like what is supposed to make this recipe hard is it the actual amount of resources just the sheer size of the setup is it the ratios that are supposed to be really tricky or buy products which is like a new thing right that we added with update free or is it the resource variety it's like a bunch of things so we tend to look at the vision first like what do we want to achieve with the recipe and then it's just a lot of fiddling around to set it up and see how it feels to build it, how the setup actually turns out with like how many buildings you need for it and how they fit together and how they line up with the belts and everything and then it's just a lot of number crunching as well so when we want to change something it's usually because something didn't match up in our vision like we we decided that something was going to be fun or we thought something was going to be fun in our vision we said this is going to be the challenge for this recipe and then it turned out that that wasn't fun or that we made a mistake that actually made that challenge not a challenge at all or made it way too difficult it's like a variety of things that can go wrong there but maybe we should take an example like like with the recent patch tweeted for the box side yeah or maybe we can actually take just the rebalance for the box site for this, update initially like the initial rebalance yeah, and that was a variety there were a variety of reasons for that the first one being is that leading up to update 4 I saw a lot of players constantly talk about the fact that they were feeling that they were hitting a wall when they got to tier 7. and I was trying to investigate why that was, and that's always quite hard but I felt that it was most probably mostly had to do but also but also because what because of what these players were saying I felt it was mostly because of the size of the setup and just the initial the complexity of getting to a new part of the game and then suddenly the game hits you with this crazy bauxite stuff that requires all these parts to be refined into other parts and then the back merging of the fluids and the byproducts just became really complex and mostly became very big and I wanted it to be complex when it came to the the byproducts and the back merging and I wanted it to be complex when it came to the resource variety but not necessarily with the sheer size of it and just that feeling of needing to do so much effort to get a little bit of aluminium so what we did then is just kind of take a step back and look at it again and say okay these are the things that we want to keep and then scale everything else down so mostly what we did we made the setup smaller right we reduce greatly the amount of refineries that you need to actually get a nice setup going we increase the amount of boundaries because foundries aren't used that much and it feels nice to kind of get to use them every now and then and generally I think the flow just became a bit better with the changes that we made because you're now able to just make a tinier setup and it skills better that way as well cool I hope that made sense it made sense to me but I also work on the game but yeah, these are also things that mark have told me and jayce 40 000 times when we make the we made the video and we're trying to explain this to other people, so yeah cool