Weapons Testing!

Aim, Fire, Aim, Fire, Aim, Fire, Aim, Fire, Aim, Fire, Aim, Fire.........

I was on holiday this week sat coding with a sea view which is amazing even during a storm. I started into the combat aspects of my game and suddenly had a bit of a wobble. I intend players of my game to be able to have a large amount of customisation which allows them to approach the game in a manner that suits the player. They can also change their approach to give variety. The issue with that is complexity. Coding the complexity into in an unfamiliar game engine stumped me for a moment and I had brief crisis off confidence but I don't want to compromise my vision. The answer suddenly became obvious, complexity of all the interacting factors can be easily overcome with automated testing. I went back to a more familiar tool, Python! I managed to get a brief wi-fi signal in my wife's favourite eco-spa hotel. The entire room had two plug sockets, not a fan of this disconnect rubbish. Anyway I thew out a post on an indie dev group about other people's approach to testing. Largely the response was negative, is it fun, we don't do that here, get players to test, players hate balance, is this a joke? There was some good advice in there more to do with how I should review the results. Anyway I've decided to build the test model which is interestingly more efficient than I first thought. I'm not only testing data I'm writing a POC with code that can be transposed into the game engine. So I'm creating formula, mechanisms and a tool to quickly tweak data so there is very little extra effort. I'll be able to run hundreds of weapons test agaisnt various configurations and get statistical data. At least I can then make informed decisions on how to balance or indeed unbalance the game. It also gives a base for setting difficulty levels. I don't have the time to spin up the game, find an enemy duke it out, then analyse logs. So my weapons test rig will definitely be a time saver regardless of whether other devs do it. I'm also not breaking my game code every 5 minutes messing with it.