I guess I’m starting my own little series of game design. I’ve made a tutorial a while ago (which is linked just below this) about checkpoints, and here’s one about difficulty in general.
- Want to not have players rage quit your game? Check out the Checkpoint Tutorial!
I’ll create more tutorials about good game design if people find them helpful.
Ok, so let’s say you have some sort of obby game about bouncing on trampolines to progress through the game, and there are 3 different kinds of sections, an easy section, a middle section, and a hard section. Your job is to make sure that these sections make the player engaged, and want to complete the section smoothly. In order to do this, you’re gonna need to keep a consistent “difficulty scale”. I should explain what I mean by a “difficulty scale”, to give a better understanding of what I’m talking about.
By the way, we’re going to use this “bouncing obby” example throughout the tutorial.
Difficulty Scale
I’m calling this term “difficulty scale” because that’s what I think fit the term the best. You can call it whatever you want.
Difficulty scales are a measure showing how the difficulty in your game changes, from stage to stage. It shows how consistent difficulty in you game is. I’ll demonstrate what I mean with pictures.
The pink line here represents how difficult the stage is, and how it’s changing.
See how this scale is consistent? This is the right way to go for difficulty, because it starts off easy, but then gets increasingly more challenging, which is what engages the player. We’ll talk about how to get this difficulty scale later in the tutorial.
Here’s a bad scale to have, it is very inconsistent, and it starts off hard, going straight down to easy, then medium. I have a term for the sudden drop of difficulty, which will be covered shortly.
There are some other terms that I should explain before showing you how to get a perfect difficulty scale.
Difficulty Spike
A difficulty spike is a spot in your difficulty scale that’s not such a high difficulty, but then shoots up to a very hard difficulty. Here is a picture to show what I’m talking about.
In the picture, the difficulty starts out as easy, but then immediately raises up to hard, then back to easy. You want to avoid this because the easy sections should be welcoming to new players, and hard sections will make it so they will not have enough experience playing your game to complete the stage, thus probably quitting, or being persistent and try to complete it, making it unforgiving to new players.
Difficulty Drop
Very similar to a difficulty spike, a difficulty drop is a spot in your difficulty scale that’s quite challenging, but suddenly drops down to a much easier difficulty. Once again, here is a picture demonstrating what it is.
Based on the picture, you’ll noticed that a difficulty drop is just a difficulty spike but “reversed”. You don’t want any difficulty drops in your game because in the hard stage, the player is prepared to conquer a harder stage, but the next thing they get is an easy stage. This makes the player less engaged, because the player wants to feel more accomplished by completing a harder stage, and by creating an easy stage right after the hard stage, you’re making the stage redundant.
The Perfect Difficulty Scale
Ok, enough about terms, I must teach you how to have the perfect difficulty scale in your game by giving you an idea about how each type of difficulty should be set up.
Easy
A new player starts at stage one, the beginning of the game. They’re not sure what to expect, and they must adapt to the game’s concept. The example being used here is the bouncy trampolines mentioned at the beginning of this tutorial. The player shouldn’t jump straight to a hard stage, they need something easy to get their ball rolling. The very first stage of your game should be kept as simple as possible. All easy stages should be simple, but this applies to the first stage the most. If the easy stages are complex, the player will get confused about what the gimmick of the game is all about. For the bouncy trampolines obby, the best first stage could be just two trampolines the player must hop across, maybe even three, or possibly four. Just as simple as two-four trampolines placed not too far away from each other. Easy stages should introduce the concept of the game to the player, and that’s why they must be simple. To keep the player engaged throughout all the easy stages, you must alter the stages by just a little bit. An example of altering the stage while keeping it simple would be moving the trampolines horizontally, or even making the trampolines higher and lower. This will mix up the easy stages, and make the player get more familiar with the concept.
Medium
After completing the easy stages, the player will now know what they have to do to get to the end. Because of this, any more simple easy stages will make the player less engaged, they want to see what mechanics can be done with trampolines. In order to keep them engaged in the medium stages, you must make the stages more complex, while staying on the player’s level. This means that you have to retain the main concept of the game, while introducing what mechanics can be created with it. In the trampoline obby, this can be achieved by making the trampolines move, like a moving platform, making the player required to have good timing to land on the trampolines. This example works because the concept of trampolines is there, but it has introduced a bit more challenging mechanic, which is the moving trampolines.
As you increase the difficulty, you’ll notice a pattern, the harder the difficulty, the more challenging and complex it must be to have the player get engaged, and want to get to the end.
Hard
For hard stages, you want to introduce more complex mechanics, and make the mechanics more challenging, while keeping the main concept of the game. There’s not a whole lot more to say, this is pretty much the same thing you do when transitioning to medium stages, making it more complex. An example of mechanics fit for a hard stage would be making the trampolines small and thin, forcing the player to be more precise when hopping to one of them. Another would be making it small and thing, and make it moving. This would be best for a hard stage because the player needs to have more skill in the concept to complete the stages.
Stitch these stages together, and you’ll notice that you have a nice, fine difficulty scale, one that starts easy, then consistently increases in difficulty for the player. This keeps the player in the game, and have them feel more accomplished and engaged when they complete a stage.
To conclude this tutorial, difficulty scale is important to be consistent because it controls the player’s experience as they progress. The smoother the difficulty scale, the more the player will become engaged. The easier the stage, the more simple it should be. The harder the stage, the more complex and challenging it must be to keep the player in the game, with a desire to finish the game.