Lords of Xulima Post-funding Update #22: Polish and Balance

The latest post-funding update for the Lords of Xulima Kickstarter campaign deals with two of the fuzziest, yet important terms I’ve ever dealt with when game development is concerned: polish and balance. Here’s a snippet:

Finding the perfect balance, or Order vs Chaos

Lords of Xulima depends on many parameters, variables and rules to achieve the right balance and keep the gameplay interesting. From how much damage a short sword can deal, to the specific Divine Resistance of a Gulfrin… all of it is contained within a single Excel document. This document is separated into roughly 20 tabs. Each of those tabs has up to 20 columns and up to 100 rows of data. In total there are about 5,000 parameters to tweak… if even one of those values happen to be slightly off, it is enough to ruin the entire game’s balance. This is what we refer to as “chaos”. However, we’re 100% dedicated to creating a memorable RPG experience, so rest easy! We take pride in our work, and slowly but surely we progress towards this sweet spot of balance that we feel LoX deserves.

Lastly, thanks to the extra content made possible by your contributions during this campaign, we estimate that the game should now offer around 100 hours of RPG goodness, for completionists. The characters will end the game around Level 50, so we’ve added even more devious enemies to keep you on your toes. That makes a total of 115 enemies, 33 of which are bosses with special mechanics.

Maybe we have gone too far on the length… what do you think? Let us know in the comments below!

To say that 100 hours of gameplay sounds like a bit of a lofty promise is an understatement, but I guess we’ll see at release.