---
title: Game Balancing
description: Game balancing is the process of adjusting a game's rules, math, and mechanics to ensure fairness and engagement. You will analyze player choices, manage difficulty curves, and use mathematical models to prevent dominant strategies.
category: arts-design
subcategory: game-design
difficulty: beginner, intermediate, advanced
url: /subject/game-balancing
---

# Game Balancing

Game balancing is the process of adjusting a game's rules, math, and mechanics to ensure fairness and engagement. You will analyze player choices, manage difficulty curves, and use mathematical models to prevent dominant strategies.

## Available Resources

2 Courses • 2 Websites

## Courses

### 1. Game Balance

Learn game balancing techniques from industry expert Ian Schreiber! Master the art of creating fair & engaging games.

**Difficulty:** Beginner | **Price:** Free

**Link:** https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=OLAK5uy_n4ccwgTI0QGw5uCNQoZgTIjmll74JOrsM

### 2. Game Design: Balancing Gameplay

Four-week CalArts course taught by Fran Krause on designing characters for games, with guest sessions from artists behind Adventure Time, Journey and SpongeBob. Learners practise proportion, mood and silhouette, then refine their own character through peer-reviewed drawing assignments.

**Difficulty:** Intermediate | **Language:** English | **Price:** Free

**Link:** https://www.coursera.org/learn/game-character-design

**Tags:** courses, arts-design, game-design

## Websites

### 1. 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.

**Difficulty:** Intermediate | **Language:** English | **Price:** Free

**Link:** https://gdcvault.com

**Tags:** websites, arts-design, game-design

### 2. 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.

**Difficulty:** Intermediate | **Language:** English | **Price:** Free

**Link:** https://gamestudies.org

**Tags:** game-studies, academic-journal, game-criticism, player-culture, digital-games

---

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