A faster sickle changes more than you would think 🌾
Why balancing Keep Harvesting takes so much work: how base stats, hundreds of skills, weather and meta upgrades interlock, and what the demo will add.
While I am still waiting for Steamworks to approve my account, I am using the time to keep balancing Keep Harvesting. And the deeper I get into it, the clearer it becomes how much work it takes.
Even the basic stats are closely tied together: health, damage, attack speed, or rather how fast the sickles fly, how long resources take to grow back, healing per second and healing from harvested resources. On top of that come the farm’s rising decay rate and the question of how many seeds you should earn for the next step in the meta progression.
And that really is just the surface.
If the sickles harvest faster, for example, that also means more resources and so potentially more healing. The farm lasts longer, reaches later rounds and can bring in more seeds for permanent upgrades. A small change in one place can have effects that reach far beyond the original value.
Changing a single value takes seconds. Finding out what it sets off across the whole game takes a lot longer.
Then come the hundreds of skills: lightning, meteors, wildfire, harvest fires, dynamite, automatic farmers, beehives and much more. Each of them should be worth taking, have its own character and allow interesting combinations. Something that looks fairly unremarkable on its own can suddenly become incredibly strong alongside the right other abilities.
Layered over all of that are the seasons, more than 50 weather types and over 400 meta upgrades. They keep changing the conditions and the options. And even this list covers only a fraction of what comes together in a single run.
For me, this variety is a big part of what makes Keep Harvesting appealing. For balancing, though, it means new questions keep coming up: is a combination too strong in general, or does everything just happen to line up right now? Is the start too hard? How does the same stretch feel with more permanent upgrades? And next to a particularly strong build, is there still enough room for other ways to play?
My testers help me a lot with this. Even so, we can only cover part of the possible combinations and situations. As the developer, I naturally know the systems pretty well and make many decisions almost automatically. Someone playing for the first time may go about it completely differently. And that perspective is exactly what is valuable.
That is why I believe the biggest step forward in balancing is still to come, once the demo is out. More players mean more different approaches, unexpected combinations and feedback on where the game feels good and where it still catches.
My goal is for strong builds to be genuinely fun. A clever combination is allowed to make the harvest escalate properly. At the same time, different paths should pay off, and the challenge should still make sense even when a run fails.
Until then, I keep testing, adjusting values and looking at what follows from each change. It is a lot more work than turning a few numbers up or down. But I think Keep Harvesting is on a good path.
Thank you to everyone who is already testing and sending me their experiences. Every piece of feedback helps turn all these individual systems into a game that feels good as a whole.