Game Balance Concepts (10-level course)
by Ian Schreiber · Game Balance Concepts (WordPress)
Ian Schreiber's free ten-week course, posted as weekly lessons with homework. Covers numeric relationships, cost curves, probability, situational balance, progression and pacing, metrics, intransitive mechanics, and game economies, with spreadsheet exercises throughout. It is a structured progression with real math and assignments, not a list of tips.
More resources on Game Balancing
Game Studies
Open-access, peer-reviewed academic journal publishing research on computer games since 2001. Articles apply humanities and social-science methods to game aesthetics, narrative, rules, and player culture, helping readers follow scholarly debates and build rigorous critical analyses of specific games.
Game Balance
Learn game balancing techniques from industry expert Ian Schreiber! Master the art of creating fair & engaging games.
Balancing Cards in Clash Royale (GDC 2017)
A free, first-hand case study of balancing a live competitive game with data, complementing the theory in the other picks. A GDC 2017 talk by Supercell designer Stefan Engblom on how the Clash Royale team balances cards in a live game. It covers metagame health goals, usage and win-rate data, and what the team got right and wrong in the first year.
Balancing Multiplayer Games (Parts 1–4)
A four-part essay series by David Sirlin that defines balance as viable options plus fairness of starting options. It covers asymmetric multiplayer games and the role of designer intuition, drawing on fighting-game balancing experience. It gives the conceptual vocabulary (viable options, fairness, dominant strategies) that the math-heavy resources assume, from a practitioner.
Game Balance
An 806-page textbook by Ian Schreiber and Brenda Romero on the math and process of balancing games. It covers economies, cost curves, progression, probability, pseudorandomness, analytics, and spreadsheet modeling, with case studies and exercises. It is the definitive reference and the expanded successor to the free course, so the two pair naturally.
gdcvault.com
GDC Vault is a comprehensive archive of Game Developers Conference talks, tutorials, and postmortems, featuring video recordings, slides, and notes on game design, mechanics, programming, and production.