The Difficulty Saw: Why Games Shouldn't Just Get Harder
Making difficulty curves in games
Game designer Dave explores how to craft difficulty curves that keep players engaged without frustration. He introduces the 'Difficulty Saw' concept—grouping mechanics into manageable chunks with their own difficulty spikes—and offers practical tips for smoothing the curve, such as optional collectibles, dynamic difficulty adjustment, and multiple paths. He also discusses methods for gathering player feedback and emphasizes that games can't appeal to everyone, so developers should target a specific audience.
Rather than seeing the game as getting more difficult on the whole, we are grouping mechanics together like in the original Tweet.
- orbital-decay
>Dynamically adjust the difficulty depending on how well the player is doing. <- This is actually magic sauce and could be the topic of a whole talk.
Please never do this. This deceptively looks smart to a game designer, but actual players read this like a book and then it feels cheap and massively unrewarding for them.
- nkrisc
This will depend on the game of course, but the best is when you can adjust the difficulty of mechanics individually.
City builders do this a lot where you often have lots of difficulty settings you can adjust to tailor the game to your preferred playstyle.
I’ll also say this: if you’re making a game and you add in a mechanic or mini-game that is not typical of the genre, make it optional or provide a way to skip it. Few things things in gaming piss me off more than a memory or Simon Says puzzle in an MMO or similar. If I wanted to play puzzle games, I’d be playing a puzzle game, not your game.
- stillpointlab
I've been watching a lot of let's play content on YouTube for incremental games (it's like an ASMR thing) and after watching a lot of these games it is clear that pacing a video game is a challenge. Sometimes the player finds a sneaky way to increase their progress that busts the game, other times they miss the correct path and get stuck in a painful grind. It is also very obvious when the game dev has targeted a play-time metric and forces the game into that metric. Incremental games really expose this dynamic since they are generally pure upgrade mechanic attached to some kind of dopamine generator (flashy lights, rhythmic sounds, etc.)
- ComputerPerson
Difficulty settings, though. He mentions them only briefly (in this incredible article).
Normal varies so much.
As a "cozy" gamer, I want the standard setting to be something I can play without having to switch my context to to the internet for help or a guide. This was one of many triumps of Baldur's Gate 3: the difficulty settings make sense in how they translate to gameplay, and the default is fun.
- reactordev
Experience curves are just as important.
However, this article reminded me of this meme