content deph for prototypes

Newbie & Debugging Questions
#1

Hi guys,
I don’t know if this fits in this section, but I think every “noob” gets to this point like I did.
How “far” should I fill my game with content for testing?
I create a dungeon crawler with final fantasy styled combat. My base theme is the Anime “Sword Art Online”. Which means, there are no Spells and everything is melee and weapon related. To equip a certain weapon you need the mastery of said weapon type. At this moment I got 22 masteries for either blunt, thrust or slash weapons. Originally there were shields or some kind of net included, but i curently have one weapon slot and one armor slot implemented and you can’t kill a skeleton with just a buckler, can you?
Each and every of this mastery has it’s own rank and gets experience when equiped in a fight. As you grow more familiar with your weapon (rank your mastery up) you get skills. Each skill represents the nature of it’s weapon. A dagger has many critical hit and multiple hit skills, while a mace has more base damage attacks.
You see, that entails a slew of content I have to create and balance.

Is there any point or threshold where I clearly can make a cut and implement other things?

Would love to hear your opinions.

#2

There are probably others that are going to say this better than I can, but here it goes.

If you want to make an effective prototype, your best bet is to either test out each weapon by itself, or to dish it out for the user base to test it for you. The most important aspect of a game is how much “fun” it is. People derive that either from the amount of challenge a game gives, or by the amount of variety a game has in the interactions. Some people solely play a game to figure out more of the story.

The best thing to do is to have one of each weapon type and judge to see if it is fun to play with each type of weapon. Then you can adjust the balance afterward to see if the game is too easy, too hard, or whatever. If you can get testers for your game, or get a prototype, that is the fastest way to attain feedback for a game.

That is my experience, and it varies from person to person.

#3

It sounds like you won’t be able to balance all that without something playable to act as a testbed. So I would suggest stripping it down to the barest rudiments - and then adding back in only the features that are needed to make play diverse and interesting. Who knows - 22 levels per ability may not be needed. Or it may not be the right route to go - testing with a small subset would show up issues like this.