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[Sneaky_Seal]

How do you use different difficulty levels and what are they intended for?

I want to start a conversation on this subject, so here are some questions that might direct it:

1. Do you first balance the game for a normal difficulty and then decrease/increase it or you go some other way about it?
2. How do you change the difficulty? Is it purely a numbers adjustement or you add/remove some features/functions?
3. What is the purpose of the different levels? Do you want to ease in the player into normal via easy? Or easy is for enjoying the story without much of a challenge?

Feel free to post any other thoughts on the subject, not related to the questions.

[_glitch]

I don't have much time so I have to keep it short, maybe I will write a longer post later.

1. The difficulty changes automatically if the player makes progress in the story or levels up. See 2.
2. Use a multiplier. I.e. if the difficulty is easy use 5, if it is normal use 10 and if it is hard use 15. You could use it in this way: EnemyDamage = constant * difficulty multiplier.
3. If you never played this game or a similar one before the player maybe wants to learn the controls and mechanics of the game. On a hard difficulty it would be sure no fun to learn if the player gets killed by one or two hits.

[s0]

MY OPINION:

1. Balance around the hardest difficulty. The hardest difficulty is where the nitty gritty of the mechanics matters the most and balancing around it will help you find flaws with your design. Then "downgrade" from there while doing your best to preserve the "feel" of the game.

2. I'm mostly skeptical about removing features because 1. imo players of all skill levels should get as close to the "full" experience as possible, 2. it can be difficult to balance around and there's a high risk of undermining your own design and making it less enjoyable (same goes for adding features for hard mode btw).

3. Making the game accessible for a wider variety of players.

That said, I'm kind of skeptical about difficulty levels in general. I can't think of many games that actually do difficulty levels well (i.e. all difficulties are more or less equally good) and I think most game designs I have "optimal" level of difficulty that is inherent in the design itself and just needs to be teased out.

[AaronB]

1) Work out the optimal response by the game to the players input, in other words make the game unbeatable through speed, accuracy, etc.

2) Use a random number generator to handicap that response.  This makes the game statistically easier to beat at the lower levels while still throwing in a few surprises.  Also makes the response seem more 'human'.

[darkhog]

My philosophy on the subject is that games are usually balanced for one difficulty only and other difficulties are just tacked on, usually by giving enemies more/less HP, speed and so on, which if we are not careful with it may provide balance issues of its own, especially if the game wasn't that much balanced in the first place.

Therefore, in my game I've decided to remove difficulty levels altogether instead concentrating on balancing the game as best as I can, with optional harder/easier paths in levels themselves, so it would appeal to players of all skill levels.

[airman4]

How do you use different difficulty levels and what are they intended for?

I want to start a conversation on this subject, so here are some questions that might direct it:

1. Do you first balance the game for a normal difficulty and then decrease/increase it or you go some other way about it?
2. How do you change the difficulty? Is it purely a numbers adjustement or you add/remove some features/functions?
3. What is the purpose of the different levels? Do you want to ease in the player into normal via easy? Or easy is for enjoying the story without much of a challenge?

Feel free to post any other thoughts on the subject, not related to the questions.

Interesting post !

How i work out
1. I go with the hardest and yeah decrease it. To me it's easier , also it helps on the framerate issues stuff knowing the easiest way will totally work (less ennemies etc )
2. Personnally i remove some features , even could do a totally different level according to the modes -> lead to something interesting and surprising and will push the curious players to try all modes , the others will jump directly on hardest and die mercilessly.
3. personnally it's for casual , especially if you do a difficult game
if they fail , they know they can enjoy the game still somehow !

[SchriefFighter]

I agree with starting at the hardest and working down, because all that is is simple math and lowering of certain stats.

[redredred]

I may go out of the questions your asking, but in my opinion, game design is good when the difficulty doesn't need to be tweaked artificially with numbers or settings (Ala Easy Medium Hard).

 Look at games like Mario and Shovel Knight for 2d, as well as Portal and Half-Life 2 for games no difficulty settings. To me, difficulty just shouldnt be number changes and stat changes, to make enemies hit harder and be taken down faster. Difficulty should be apply directly to the skills learned by the player and how the player uses the skills and abilities he learns to problem solve harder more varied problems.

I think tweaking difficulty by numbers is just like this analogy. You introduce Addition to your player (1 + 1), the player knows immediately how to solve it. In a hard setting, you'll still only be introducing addition but in greater scale (Like 100 + 100)

In that analogy, the numbers are just tweaked by manner of scale. But if you give your design a lot of variance, then you don't need to artificially blow up numbers. The variety will equate to difficulty already.

So if you introduce Addition in level one. (1+1)
Subtraction in level 2 (2-1)
and Multiplication in Level 3 (3x2)

Then you can mix it up already in the subsequent levels with 2+3(2x4) without altering the scale of the problems.
I don't know if I'm articulating this right or if I'm making any sense. I've been awake for nearly 26 hours now.

[Fat Pug Studio]

For my game (shmup) i use a custom made adaptive system.



Every spawned enemy has a value which adds up to the enemy pool which maximum size depends on the experience point which are gained by destroying enemies. When the pool fills up, no new enemies are spawned. When you kill the enemy, you get experience points which are used to determine the pool size. Further more, spawned enemies are added to the array (and removed from upon destruction) which serves as an on-screen enemy counter. Its function is a sort of a double-checker, if there's a lot of small enemies with low pool values on screen, it will also not spawn new enemies, regardless of the fact that the amount of enemies on pool allows for more spawns.

Experience points variable is also used to enable progressive enemy behavior (higher experience > more bullets fired, faster bullets, etc.)