Balancing the ×2 Gate

The ×2 gate is the best feeling in Gate Runner, which makes it the most dangerous thing to balance. Multiply too freely and every run ends with a thousand soldiers steamrolling the boss. Multiply too rarely and the game is an addition worksheet. This post is the tuning log, with the actual numbers.

Spacing is pacing

Gate pairs started 30 world units apart. At the squad's fixed run speed of 9 units a second, that's a choice every three seconds — you were still watching your crowd absorb the last gate's math when the next pair arrived, so choices felt random. We widened spacing to 42 units and moved the zombie horde to the midpoint between gates. That midpoint placement matters more than it sounds: you always meet the fight with exactly the squad your last decision built, so cause and effect stay legible.

It still wasn't enough air. The final layout runs 50 units between pairs — about five and a half seconds of running. Enough to see the horde, count your crowd, and commit to the next gate with intent.

Zombies that hurt, then zombies that teach

The first horde pass shipped under the commit message "zombie hordes that actually hurt," and they did — too much. Early levels were a wall. The fix wasn't weaker zombies everywhere; it was a gentler entrance: slower zombies in the early levels, longer weapon range so the squad starts firing sooner, and a ramp that saves the cruelty for later packs.

Then we made the first two levels do the teaching directly: level 1 only asks you to steer, level 2 introduces the multiplier. No tooltip essays — the level layout is the tutorial.

Three flavors of fair

Once the curve held for new players, we split it into Normal, Hard, and Brutal. Same levels, different horde math — Brutal is for people who've internalized that a ×2 at 40 soldiers beats a +30 every time. Shipping big-crowd difficulty also surfaced a steering bug: past a certain crowd size the formation could shove itself through the corridor clamp. Fixed in the same build — a crowd wide enough to break physics is exactly the crowd Brutal produces.

The curve isn't finished — that's what TestFlight is for. Which brings us to the next post: what 28 builds in two days actually looks like.