To put it in short, I’m concerned some levels in my horror game might be too easy or fast to beat when playing with 3-4 people. More people cover more area, and there is only one monster. (I also don’t want to spawn multiple monsters for lore purposes). How would I scale the difficulty of my horror game level with more players?
What type of horror game is it, a maze area? or inside a house? Do you need to collect items or just explore?
It’s a semi-maze like area where you find items. (Also I know a lot of games this type are extremely boring but this one won’t be I promise) So yeah I’m just concerned with multiple people they will find the items too fast. I also don’t think just simply adding more items will be good enough since you are still covering the same amount of land and it won’t take longer to get items.
I’d recommend trying to add more items and try and separate the players. Maybe add shifting walls, or maybe lock certain areas of the maze off until a key or a certain point of the maze is reached? That way, no matter where the players go the only way to progress would be to backtrack and discover new areas.
Shifting walls are a neat idea, I assume you mean that after collecting a certain threshold of items, a wall dissapears and a new area of the map is unlocked right
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The usual scaling goes as such:
More players = More items.
I don’t know if this would be fitting for your game, but I’d suggest adding ambience sounds and fake monster noises, and silhouettes (around corners etc, preferably client sided) to have them panic/make mistakes, therefore hindering their progress in some way, rather than just artificial difficulty increase with more items to find. Although this would require a bit more thought put into it for it to be actually effective, instead of just piling a collection of random noises and have them play, since, people will quickly catch on that they’re just fake noises and brush them off.
An example I can name is Pressure’s ambience sounds, one of them is slow footsteps that get louder and louder, another is a continuation where the footsteps turn into rapid sprinting. I had this happen to me where these sounds played in a perfect order (I don’t usually get scared or freak out over roblox ‘horror’) but I actually panicked and ran to a locker.
I never fell for it again, but It’s still a nice addition to have in games.
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