Hi all,
I played games that I felt like a superhero. I really liked them.
I played games that I say “Enough, I don’t want to suffer anymore!” but still played them and finished.
My game as a mobile tower defense game is on the boundary between these two.
My dignity says: Make your game difficult and force your players to enhance their abilities.
My heart says, screw dignity made the game easy and let everyone have fun and be willing to pay you.
Both ways have also 2 dangers.
If it is too difficult it pushes the players out of the game. If it is too easy it can be booring.
And the balance is also not easy because people are not the same. (As reflexes and experience etc.)
What do you think?
I agree with @altepTest on this one. This is an artificial choice. The only right answer is ‘do both’. Just put a setting in your game and let the player select which version they want to enjoy. Furthermore, make it a spectrum and it helps the replay-ability too.
Funny I was just watching a video on the tube about players doing the dark souls games back to back without getting hit a single time.
I would say one thing about difficulty. There are roughly two kinds of difficulty: one where you just adjust some value like dps, and another where you build the learning curve out of a distinct set of skills that a player can learn and familiarize with.
These two are not exactly different: one can build the set of skills for a player to learn, and then (perhaps optionally) adjust value(s) to make it easier or harder.
But I think it’s very easy, if one does not purposefully build a game around skill, to not bother with going very deep with the mechanics, because after all if many players are just going to cruise through on easy, it’s a lot of wasted effort. Most modern AAA games are like this. And creating good learning curves in a game is no easy task.
Personally, I think it’s good to at least design a variety of enemies that each develop certain distinct skills whether they are hard or easy. I find games that are not challenging often still satisfying when they require me to learn and use something that ‘makes sense’ for a particular situation.
There is a game design technique called a “difficulty setting” that solves this exact problem.
How difficulty settings work is that somewhere in your game there is a menu that has the options “easy”, “normal” and “hard”. If the user clicks normal, you run the game as designed. If they click easy you dial down the numbers so its a cake walk. If they click hard you dial things up so they have to learn the system in detail.
thanks a lot but in my game design it is not easy even not possible to give that chance to the user.
It is too complicated for this arrangement.
It must be at the development stage.
I feel your pain, I’ve had no teaching or working past programming knowledge before trying to create a game and my code is a mess that myself have no idea how it functions 6 months later. Very difficult/impposible to implement different options and adjust settings for different modes.
That because I’ve added brick after brick of functionality figuring out on the go why and how something should work.
I’m learning various game design patterns and best practices exactly for that, to have the option to adjust the game, like for example being able to remodel the entire game for an easy or hard mode.
I suggest just finish the game as it is, if is hard or easy. If your game is easy who likes the game to be hard will maybe pass this time. Then the next game create a more detailed game plan on paper before starting to code
Yeah I decided that to :).
Today I made 20 levels instead of 2 (like other days) because I stopped saying "It must be hard enough for players to not get bored. Instead, I just made it easy to have fun and it was fun even while designing it
Do like mario games. make the game easy at the beginning and get more difficult as you go. Make the most difficult levels optional, so people don’t feel frustrated that they can’t finish the story.
Difficulty, as with many things in game design, is dependant on what you are aiming for. What is your target market? Does your game offer more than challenge (check out Marc LeBlanc’s 8 Kinds of Fun)?
Difficulty Settings is one option (easy in tower defence, just change enemy hit points or player weapons strengths), but has problems. Some will always choose the easy option, even if turns out boring. Some think they have only completed the game if they choose the hardest setting, even if it is too much for them. Some will chose a setting and find it is just wrong for them, but may feel locked in (sometimes they are locked in as some events may be dependant on the setting selected).
Adaptive difficulty is another option. Make it harder for someone going through the game fast, easier for someone going slow.
There are options to push the better player harder, such as extra visual rewards for doing special tasks. If you have upgrades, it can become a bit more natural, with the strong player trying to win through as soon as they have the tools to potentially complete the level if making the most of their skill, while the less skilled can spend time building up.
Personally I prefer a game that has been well considered and has just the right difficulty for the majority of the target market, rather than options.
A typical tower defense has waves of units navigating the level that have a certain amount of health that must be damaged to be destroyed. The player typically has an allotment of points that they start with as well as points that they earn from destroying units. Right there we have four variables.
You don’t even necessarily need to redesign anything. For example if you are spawning a fixed number of units each wave you simply need to modify the fixed number in some way (eg a multiplier), but if you are spawning infinitely until the wave is deactivated you can simply adjust the delay between spawns.
Who is your audience? What do they want? Don’t try to satisfy everyone from the start. To start with, pick a specific group of people based on what they want and design a thing that gives it to them.
Your “dignity” is targeting “hardcore” gamers and your “heart” is targeting “casual” players. Those are very different audiences and you’re making life hard for yourself if you’re trying to satisfy them both.
So if you’re targeting challenge-hungry gamers, make it hard. They want to do things which are challenging so that they feel good once they manage to beat the challenge. If the game is easy they won’t have fun at all because it’s boring when they’re not being pushed.
If you’re targeting other types of gamers then you need to figure out what they want, and then design your game around that. Plenty of games are designed without significant challenge, but they always have something to keep their audience engaged. Interesting stuff to find? Cosmetics to unlock? An engaging story? Character / ability progression?
Satisfying different audiences can be done, of course. Big-budget games do it regularly. Usually they do it by having different engagement hooks for different groups, plus the difficulty settings already mentioned earlier. And that’s challenging, even with plenty of resources and development expertise, because there’s a constant balancing act of increasing audience reach without diluting stuff for the original core audience(s).
But then, there rises the question: how many “hardcore gamers” want to play another mobile tower defense? Even if it ends up being the Dark Souls of all tower defense clones.
How about age old, secondary goals? like with ranks or time target? finishing the level is easy, finishing the level with one arm in the back, blindfolded under 30s and without getting it is 5 star rank and is difficult.
Not That much easy. for example in my tower defense game you create your towers by combining 7 different towers. (as 2 or 3) . And you need to combine element towers to create generation 2 and generation 3 elements and some monsters only can be killed by these 2. and 3. generation element towers.
You can not just say “Increase the hp and woooop you raised the difficulty”. You have to create all the mechanisms from the beginning. Which is not the right way for an Indie game developer whose company only has 1 slave.
I already released a tower defense and working on the sequel at the moment and it’s not that hard to provide different difficulty levels:
Vary HP
Vary time between waves (longer breaks for easy mode, shorter for hard)
Vary size of waves (less monsters for easy, more for hard)
Drop restrictions for Gameplay if feasible (eg in Elemental War 2 I have element zones and building a tower there that has a disadvantage of this element gets a debuff, but not in easy mode)
Drop more gold (or whatever your currency is) on easy mode
Don’t know your game so don’t know what can be applied to it, but I guess most things can.
I mean Paradox manages to provide difficulty choices for their games…
Another alternative is to introduce a leveling system and a grind. That way players are able to self balance their difficulty level to match their preferences.
