Deep Dive: Balancing a Goose Game
The iteration that turned a text adventure into something playable—balance tuning, achievement scaffolding, and the 1081-line manual that made it legible.
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The first playtest ended with my wife abandoning the game on day 3. “I don’t know what I’m supposed to do,” she said, “and the honking costs too much.” She was right. The verbs worked, the tests passed, and the play experience felt like trudging through a spreadsheet.
The fix was not more features. The fix was sitting down with a pencil and doing arithmetic against a constraint I’d ignored: 30 time units per day, 20 days, 600 total actions to achieve victory. Every cost I’d chosen casually now had to justify itself against that budget.
The Budget Problem
Here’s what was broken. A player who wants to explore all six zones and honk at things—the core fantasy—burns through time like this:
- Travel between zones: 3 units each (I’d set it high to make flying feel “special”)
- Honk at an NPC: 2 units each
- Pick up dropped loot: 2 units each
Six zones, one honk per zone, grab the loot: that’s 30 units. An entire day. And the player has done almost nothing toward their goal.
Once I framed the numbers this way, the failures became obvious. If a goal requires more actions than the budget allows, it isn’t “hard”—it’s impossible. The same applies to feedback loops: if a core verb feels expensive, players stop using it and the fantasy collapses. Nobody plays Canada Goose Simulator to carefully ration their honks.
The Re-Tuning
I adjusted every cost to respect the budget:
| Action | Before | After | Reasoning |
|---|---|---|---|
| Honk | 2 | 1 | Honking is the fantasy. Make it cheap. |
| Travel | 3 | 2 | Six zones, casual exploration. |
| Fly | 3 | 4 | Strategic escape, not default move. |
| Waddle | 1 | 1 | Already fine. |
| Look/Status/Map | 0 | 0 | Information should be free. |
For the Dynasty Builder goal, the lifecycle was impossible—incubation plus maturation took longer than the game:
| Phase | Before | After | Why |
|---|---|---|---|
| Egg incubation | 3 days | 2 days | TEND daily, then hatch |
| Gosling maturation | 7 days | 5 days | Reach independence before day 20 |
| Observations to learn | 3 | 2 | Learning loop completes faster |
The inventory cap settled at 8 items. More than 5 made The Hoard trivial; fewer than 8 made The Nested Life feel like constant micro-management. Eight keeps the nest loop alive without punishing the player for picking up something interesting.
None of these changes are exciting on their own. Together, they make the system tractable: time feels tight but not punitive, honking is frequent, and goals are achievable without perfect play.
Achievements as Quiet Tutorials
With the numbers fixed, I added achievements for two reasons: give completionists obvious targets, and teach mechanics to everyone else without lecturing.
The list is deliberately small:
Goal Achievements — one per victory condition:
- The Nested Life (build perfect nest)
- Agent of Chaos (annoy 50 NPCs)
- Dynasty Builder (raise 3 goslings)
- The Hoard (stockpile 30 food)
- Territorial Supremacy (claim all 6 zones)
Milestones — highlight mechanics:
- First Honk (tutorial: you can honk)
- Vocal Victor (win a honk battle against the swan)
- Minor Nuisance (annoy 10 NPCs—shows honk range affects multiple targets)
- Bread Bandit (steal food from an NPC—shows the steal/drop loop)
Hidden — reward discovery:
- Peace Was an Option (finish without honking—proves it’s possible)
Mastery:
- Ultimate Goose (earn every achievement) — unlocks the Golden Goose Trophy desk decoration
A milestone is a tutorial that doesn’t feel like one. “Minor Nuisance” teaches honk range by rewarding the player for noticing that honks affect up to 4 NPCs within 3 tiles. “Bread Bandit” teaches that aggressive honking makes NPCs drop their loot. The achievement tracks what the player discovered; it doesn’t explain it in advance.
The Manual Problem
This game has six zones, five goals, a territory system, goslings with personalities, a day/night loop, and a honk battle minigame. That’s a lot of surface area for a text interface where the player types HONK and hopes for the best.
So I wrote the manual—1081 lines—and treated it as part of the design.
The result is old-school: a reference that players can skim for commands or read end-to-end for strategy. Table of contents, command reference, zone maps, NPC behaviours, food values, time costs. Everything I wish the game could teach implicitly but can’t because the interface is dense and discoverability is limited.
The manual exists because the genre demands it. Text adventures from 1980 shipped with manuals. Canada Goose Simulator ships with one too. If you’re going to build something that feels like Infocom, commit to the form.
What I Learned About Balance
The most important change wasn’t any single number. It was the willingness to let the budget drive the design. Once I tuned the costs and timings to fit 600 total units of time, the rest aligned:
- The honk loop got loud (cheap honks, frequent use)
- The gosling loop got visible (hatch on day 2, mature by day 7, finish by day 12)
- The achievement loop taught without lecturing
The lesson is boring and unglamorous, which makes it true: balance is arithmetic first, flavour second. When the arithmetic is honest, the flavour can be playful. When the arithmetic is broken, no amount of deadpan humour or procedural honk audio will save the experience.
The game that made my wife quit on day 3 now plays through to victory in about 45 minutes. That’s not because I added features—it’s because I respected the constraint that was always there.
See also: Deep Dive: Building a Canada Goose Simulator — the core mechanics and audio model.