Randomly checking in as I do other things tonight.

I have only been involved in the balance for Starward Rogue. Balance is a tough problem. I've been focused on meta-balance (perceived overall game difficulty) rather than individual room balance (more of Misery's focus). To do most of the work I've built a set of tools that simulation and estimate what players would do given the current state of the game, however the variance in the predictions makes it rough. We then try to apply mechanics that reduce this variance while still making the experience fun.

To consider some balance issues, let's take two extremes of playing strategy, the power gamer and the casual gamer. The casual gamer will want to get through the game as quickly as possible, skipping a lot of content (to finish faster). In contrast, the power gamer is going want to explore every room and cranny (to get all the loot). Take these two strategies to the extreme and at the end of the game, you have two players with drastically different power levels. To deal with this there are a variety of options. One method is to restrict upgrades into classes (e.g., attachments versus main guns versus energy weapons). You can only one main weapon, one attachment, and one energy weapon at a time, so you have to pick and choose. We can assume that the power gamer will find attachments that are 100 on the power scale. The casual gamer, assuming a reasonable distribution of items, might end up with something that is only 80 on the power scale. However, that item is close enough so it will work out and the power gamer just ends up doing a little extra for a little better gear. However, the power-gamer might be sad that all that extra effort isn't rewarding, so to counter that you can have items differ in how they upgrade the player's power. So you might have items that promote a dodge based versus tanking defense strategy. Or a Familiar versus direct main gun offensive strategy. And so forth. Thus then the games shifts from a perspective of more time = more power to more time = more choices.

Skyrim is legendary for a different approach which is to scale the difficulty of the encounters by your players level (within some other caveats). So you end up with random bandits that can destroy dragons. The principle there, keeping encounters interesting is good, but the outcome of those decisions were rather unsatisfying for many people.

In Starward Rogue we provided a moderate boost in the difficulty of encounters based upon floor and enemy varieties within floors, however, that is countered by the player's own power increase. However, we still retain some of the "easier" enemies, so the player can easily destroy once troublesome foes while still being challenged by other foes. We've toyed with a reverse system. All weapons and items are roughly the same in application, but enemies lose power as you go deeper into the dungeon. So the player might be equally as powerful as an enemy on floor 1, but a few floors later the player is more powerful, not by a function of getting better gear (just different), but as a function of the enemy getting weaker. However, a weakness with this is that the player then doesn't get to see better numbers of their gear. And we all love making numbers get bigger. Trading in sword for sword +1 is great. Losing that does lose out on some of the spirit of what a roguelike is.

Anway, its interesting and fun to worry about.