GoKawiilThe games industry is weird because we are always trying to create systems that keep the game just hard enough to stop people from seeing the rest of the product.
My thought process all started from this Tweet:
We agonised over this when we made lemmings and we took a long time smoothing the difficulty curve and we broke up the step changes into different sections, like chapters rather than difficulty settings. This let the user choose and set expectations. — Russell Kay (@RussellKay) May 23, 2018
What is a Difficulty Curve?
So briefly when I talk about a difficulty curve I’m talking about how games scale the difficulty for each level / puzzle. For example, you don’t want to introduce too many gameplay systems too quickly, but also you don’t want the first 10min of each level very slowly teaching the player something they already understood 5min ago.
This gets hard as a game developer because we are playing the game all the time and inadvertently get really good. It’s hard to put yourself back into the mind-set of someone playing our game for the first time, and simple things like how tricky a jump should be or what each button does becomes meaningless.
I think there is a perception that games need to get harder and harder the further in the player gets. But really this isn’t true, you just want to give players the feeling of getting better and the digital-pat-on-the-back for doing so.
I Present To You, The Difficulty Saw!
Rather than seeing the game as getting more difficult on the whole, we are grouping mechanics together like in the original Tweet.
What do I mean when I say New Mechanic? This might be:
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