Balancing a Game Nobody Has Played Yet: Deterministic Autoplay, and the One Metric I Got Wrong
Balancing a game usually works like this: you ship it, you wait, you watch a dashboard fill up with player deaths, and then you nudge a number and do it all again. That loop needs players. I did not have players. I had a tower-defense game I built in Flutter, an unreleased one, and a very specific question: is wave 20…