The Guide To Making A Difficulty Chart[Part 1]

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#1

Note

Im Writing This Tutorial In My Free time,to make sure that more people get to know about this. About the topic of making a perfect obby, difficulty chart. Before I Start this tutorial i would like to point out that if you think a difficulty chart is pointless, worthless, a waste of time, etc. Please dont spend you time reading this as this will infuriate you even more
Thanks

Learning

In This Tutorial you will learn the following

  • How To Make, a difficulty chart, step by step with planning involved.
  • Your Target Audience
  • Planning Involved With Many Other Skills
  • How to handle your finance efficiently to make your you dont go in debt for this game.
  • How ot Advertise Your Game And reach the top page for a small amount of time!

First Step – Planning

Many people make this mistake of directly start building, but there is A LOT Of things that need to be assured first. Before you start anything you need to make a plan.
In this plan you need to specify the following.

  • Your Build Style.
  • Your Robux Amount (Fine to start with 0, Better to start with more)
  • How Many Stages do you want per difficulty(Should be even)
  • How Many difficulties you want.
  • How much you can do, a.k.a Your Work load
  • How many people Your Going to hire
    This is a little, if not A lot of things that you would need to plan before making a difficulty chart.
    If you are having trouble doing this, i suggest making a chart somewhat similar to this
    Note I Used Sublime Text, You can use Whatever you want i guess
    image
    After Planning The Following And Having A Breif Knowledge of what your games going to be, Now is the time you need to hop onto studio and start developing

Second Step – Building/Developing

The Main Thing in the difficulty, is the builds and how good can you make it so people dont leave your game/ dislike your game pretty often.
Note People WILL Dislike your game a lot so you need to accept this.
Build Style : Everybodys build Style varies and you can choose which one you want.
The 2 frequently used Build Styles are
The Studs: Most Of The Difficulty Charts Use This One
The Smooth Builds: Less Difficulty charts use this one, However the build style is pretty neat.
After Choosing This, You want to make the chart itself
You can follow Jtohs/ Jukes Tower of hell or make your own one up, dosent matter really.
Now i cant specify what you need to build because i cant, you need to use your imagination to do this.
What i can give you, is tips for making your obbies.

  • Make Your Obbies Easy And Hard
    I mean that you should make few of your difficulties easier so that your audience finds it fun to play the game, making your robux earned and time played more.:herb: . Making your game too hard results in players leaving and disliking your game more, and making it to easy gives the player no challenge and bacically a huge mega fun obby, which makes the obby boring.
    So The solution to this, is to make few difficulties easier and progress it harder.
    eg - I have 10 difficulties, i make 3 easy to do, the player becomes happy since hes able to do it, then progress higher. This not only triggers the player to feel better, but also gives a fun interaction between you and the player.Also after the 3 easy ones make it harder since, there will always be sweats/Tryharders which will reach the end pretty easily.So making your end stages harder, you result in them playing more.
  • Dont Make each stage Extremly short.
    You stage should not consist of 1 stud each or making your obby 1 wrap and on to the next checkpoint. Which means that your obby should contain Gameplay.
  • Bonuses Are Extras
    If you add a new feature like races , towers, new gamemodes etc, its a bonus to the game for people who want to try out newer things. Many big games do this After They release for advertising techniques as well as being much more time consuming. Thats why they decide it to be an update.Things like leaderboards and donation boards are important to make a competitive enviourment for your players and your community.
    That bacically what i can think for now, ill update this post if i have any further tips.

Step 3 – Scripting.

I Think you already know at this point, that scripting is 100% important. Not only in this game, but any other game your making. Not meaning to insult any builders. But if you already do know how to script properly, it shouldnt be too hard for you to build. This Means that you can script and build since building can be learned quicker?? Im not really sure at this point but anyways this game does need scripting.
Main Parts In Scripting that are important for this type of game are

  • Checkpoints – Define the very essence of difficulty Charts.
  • Skip Stages – Pass through Devproducts, used by players to skip a stage(If you want to monitize)
    **This may seem short as these 2 are Bacically the main things.
    bUT sHRINe wHAt aBouT r tO rESET oR sTAGe sELECtors
    yes yes, those things may be important, but the key things im listed are essentials and carry heavy importance to this game.
    if you dont know how to do this, there are COUNTLESS tutorials on this and can be easily done if you just typed on youtube.
    Hiring somebody for this would be a simple Waste, if you are hiring a scripter, i would suggest for making the checkpoints look better, like tweening , stage text etc.
    Any way the things you mostly see in other games like the “Essentials” put are
  • R to Reset,
  • Shop Uis
  • To Lobby and other transport mechanisms,
  • Stage Transfer
  • Settings,
  • Spectate
    Etc
    These are the most common things seen in difficulty chart games that arent very essential,
    But They are important and due to this make the game intresting for the player
    Again All These are found on youtube.
    And im 100% sure, as i searched it myself and found Countless ones. If you want to make something special or unique, hire sombody or make a dev post, search on youtube, etc
    **Thats bacically everything needed in the scripting part, If you want too add more addons or make it more fancy thats on you.

Monitization

Well, im sure you want to make robux of this game too, and really want to profit well of this. In fact a lot of these types of games do this.
There are many ways to monitize your game but i will state the essentials again.(My Opinion on what they are)

  • Skip Stage - 20 - 50 Robux
  • Gamepasses - Gravity Coils/Speed Coils/Vip/Instant Respawn Etc
  • Premium Products For Premium Payouts
  • Donation Board(Stress on this because many games earn their revenue based of this)
    And few other ways. This may seem like less ways of making money, but trust me once your game blows up, it will be More than enough
    Well according to me these should be the ways that you can earn Money From These Type of games.
    Dont make it too pay to win as this could result in your games reputation going :arrow_double_down:

Finishing Up

Now i may need to end this post as this is getting Way to long. However if you follow some steps your well on your way to making a good difficulty chart.
There will be around 2 more parts to this series, and i do know i could add way more to what i just did but im a little tired at the moment so yea.
Thanks for giving time to read this.:small_blue_diamond:

24 Likes
#2

This is an excellent tutorial. Keep me updated if you make new tutorials!

3 Likes
#3

Great tutorial, well detailed! Can’t wait to see the next part.

#4

I like this tutorial, it’s great for developers looking to make a difficulty chart, but there are a few point that I disagree on.

Short stages do have gameplay, and are necessary for introducing obstacles. The very best thing you can do for all difficulties is to introduce new obstacles not by having a sign saying something like “this is a kill brick it kills you if you touch it”, but rather introduce them by having a very brief stage that just includes that obstacle, afterwards, use that obstacle more creatively by combining more obstacles with it, for instance, introduce a seesaw and killbrick, and for your next obstacle, you can have kill bricks welded to a seesaw. Your player is familiar with both obstacles, so it’ll be a fun challenge to get past both at once.

Many difficulty charts don’t do this, and it’s part of the reason they’re unfairly frustrating.

While it’s better to have awesome builds, players don’t dislike difficulty charts because of the build. They dislike them because of how poorly design some of the stages are, and how frustrating it is. Builds are still important for having the player use it to guide themselves, and also for a nice aesthetic, but the major thing developers must focus on to keep away dislikes and to keep players is stage design. Don’t simply slap on a couple platforms and call it a day, think about the platforms and if the player would get frustrated or if an obstacle needs to be introduced properly.

Also for building, be careful to not use so many parts that the player will have frequent lag spikes. I recommend turning on streaming enabled if this happens.

I do think VIP and instant respawn would be worth it, but coils can greatly change the game and make it too easy, because when designing stages, players are expected to not have coils, which leads to coil players practically skipping stages. Not saying that you shouldn’t 100% add coils, but if you are, you should make it slightly easier for people with coils for stages which is pretty hard to do to balance out coil players and non coil players.

I think you should edit this tutorial to make a stage design section along with scripting and build, to teach developers to introduce obstacles properly and make the obby harder in a way where it is actually harder, but not frustrating. The more complex you get with obstacles, the harder it is, and remember to always place checkpoints after every couple obstacles, because these are essential for reducing frustration.

4 Likes
#5

Hey dude, thanks for taking time and giving feedback
really appreciate it.
I really did write it blindly. In the post where i mentioned how goods your builds are. i wanted to express myself saying that if your game is too hard people you rage and dislike it. however i what i said was very vague from the topic i wanted thanks for pointing it out.
also this is what i think should be done to make a decent difficulty chart for devs who dont know where to start. i agree with the fact that coils can be damaging to the obby as people can easily cheese their way through making the difficulty factor useless. ill be sure to edit it after a good rest. Thanks

1 Like
#6

Very inspiring tutorial mate very few come with this idea.

1 Like
#7

As someone who plays obbies a lot, I would like to give these extra tips as well:

  • Have variety in your jumps/obstacles, this helps on making your obbies feel less repetitive
  • Don’t put mandatory jumps that are way too hard or too easy for a difficulty
    For example, you don’t want to put really hard jumps that the player has to do on an easy stage or filling a stage in later difficulties with only very easy jumps (unless you want to make a break stage)
  • Playtest often, you may found unintentional shortcuts, a bug, or random difficulty spikes (when a part in your stage is way too hard than the rest)

Nice tutorial btw :smiley:

2 Likes
#8

this is a great tutorial! i will deffinetly make a difficulty chart obby sometime soon
ty for the tutorial