Had a good discussion with @sylvie about the purpose and function of Difficulty in games and when I'm not so husked and barely conscious I might write some of those thoughts down here.
Alright so, when I started talking with @sylvie about how difficulty can make you engage more deeply with a game and how it encourages you to solve problems in the game's system, my thoughts on how I gauge Difficulty really started to click into place in a more conscious way for me.
In platformers like Celeste or Sylvie Lime (Although many Sylvie games have this quality and you should play them to see!) the difficulty comes in mechanically and through level design. You have to figure out really precise or creative or technically difficult ways to complete a section, you die often, get to retry rapidly, and this entire process is both fun and it pushes a player to get better at the movement techs, think in new ways about movement in this space, and it feels extremely rewarding when they clear a stage.
I mostly write visual novels and text-heavy exploration games. Most people don't think of VNs as having any Difficulty to them because the mechanics are usually really simple, but if And Then, There Were None can have a difficulty level as a novel then games can too. If you've ever felt stressed out by a dialogue choice or agonized over doing a fight because of the character implications or pored over a wiki to try and understand soulsborne lore, that's a sign of difficulty too, isn't it? The narrative's hooked you just like those platformer mechanics and because of that, you think about it more deeply and feel driven to engage with it more seriously. I'd even argue that just like games teach you how to play them mechanically, they teach you how to read them too.
It's just not a thing I ever really thought about in these terms because these aren't the terms or frames we usually use to talk about narrative design.
I've got more thoughts on this, but I also really want to know:
How do you think of Difficulty in your games? How do you decide where that difficulty comes up, why you've added it, and what effect it has on the player?
so, in a general sense i usually don't think "oh i'm going to make This Thing Difficult" right from jump street. sometimes there are exceptions to this (parrying and shielding mechanics I generally give a high reward of some kind and so they're usually tricky but not impossible to do), but a rough breakdown of how i handle difficulty in my game design practice is this:
- I sort of just start by taking the mechanical premise in question and implementing it however I can get it implemented.
- Then, based on the strength of the mechanic and how I want players to think about using it, that's when i decide how challenging said premise is to interact with and why i want it that way. things that are Hard To Do in my games are usually things that will benefit you greatly if you can pull them off -- hard calls on enemy behavior, doing something that will greatly disadvantage your opponent, or otherwise Risky Business. if you decide to do the risky, high-payoff thing, the game will basically say "ok, but you're going to work for it somehow".
- i usually also dovetail the second step with a lot of watching people while playtesting and just noting what they do and don't do.
- i don't do explicit difficulty levels/settings in my game design practice because i've found that letting people dictate the how of their experience does better to modulate difficulty than standard easy/normal/hard/very hard type stuff. instead i roll it under gameplay options (and to a similar degree, accessibility options) so that players can more granularly work with the things they do/don't like and let that shape the difficulty of interacting with the game. i always have cam shake options, text blip options, and after final spike I've implemented press/hold toggles for character abilities, etc.
this process is usually really exploratory and tends to meander a lot, but i find that it's sort of the most natural way to really feel things out in my designs.
examples are below the cut because i talk exhaustively about this for two of my games, one which is finished and the other which i'm currently working on.
final spike landed where it did on this front because of this kind of push-and-pull process. in early versions of the game the ball would come in from the side after each point:
I initially built up a number of visual cues to let the player know when the ball was going to come in and at which approximate point it was going to land. i'd already deliberately removed the standard limitation on how many times you're allowed to touch the ball from regular volleyball because it's a 1-on-1 game and you don't have a partner to pass the ball to.
but the thing i observed is that people had a hard enough time just getting used to maneuvering the ball normally, which I did intend to be at least a little tricky, and i eventually figured out that I wanted the "hard part" of the game to be going for big, risky plays like hyper jumping, sliding into the ball, spiking it, etc., because those mechanics can have a drastic effect on game state. by contrast, getting to set up your next play when a point resets everything shouldn't be nearly as troublesome to figure out. so, in the final game, when a point is scored, the ball appears on the other player's side after 3 seconds and just hovers in place without falling. the match timer doesn't start running again until the player interacts with it.
in a different vein, viral core busters used to have a data integrity meter. the idea behind it was to motivate players to move quickly from checkpoint to checkpoint, and then to later add on the pressure of accomplishing certain tasks while on that deadline in order to get powerups.
it got removed early on because i found that it was too much of an extra layer on top of the planned powerup system; now you're having to decide what tasks you can do most efficiently and trying not to get cheated out of your powerup by running out of time and losing the powerup you just earned, and x y z. while i think that games that force you to engage with like, Really Frictionful Stuff right out the gate can be interesting sometimes, it was holding VCB back because it didn't give people time to adjust to the characters, and didn't give them time to actually figure out which type of tasks they'd want to even do. even if I'd had a proper "training mode" level I think it would've had the same effect. it's likely that if i were to do the data integrity meter now it'd be a toggleable option in the menu or otherwise part of the powerup system as an optional challenge that would make powerups stronger, just so that players have to opt in to that level of difficulty as opposed to being co-opted in.
i guess the way to say it, functionally, is that i like the "hard parts" of my games to be the parts where you want to do something not just normally cool but cool AND extremely beneficial to you in ways that have an outsize effect on how you want the game to go.
