Jason Cheneau

Context

In 2023, I worked at Ankama as a game designer in charge of game balancing for their latest game, Waven. Waven is a tactical deckbuilding MMORPG where players create builds by combining class spells, items and companions. Because most items and companions are shared across classes, any balance change could impact multiple metas at once, making traditional trial-and-error balancing costly and risky.

During production, identifying overpowered or underperforming builds was a real problem that required long manual testing cycles. Balance changes often had unintended side effects on other classes, every element being in a fragile equilibrium.

My work

As the game designer in charge of balancing, I was responsible for identifying problematic builds, proposing and validating balance changes, and securing the balance state for the game's initial release.

To improve the efficiency and reliability of balancing decisisons, I designed and developed an internal balancing tool allowing us to model builds (with spells, items and companions), simulate the impact of stat and rule changes across multiple builds, identify potential balancing issues before implementing changes in-game. The goal was iterate more quickly on balancing decisions

The usual workflow was:

• Identify problematic builds through playtests and internal feedback
• Formalize the behavior and stats of game elements in the tool
• Simulate balance changes and analyze their impact on the current meta
• Define new values and validate them through targeted playtests
• Iterate until the balance reached an acceptable stability level