Making difficulty curves in games - Stuff Made By Dave

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The idea of a difficulty curve is all wrong

The 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.<br>— 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:

A new enemy type

A new ability the player has

A new type of puzzle

A way of using a system in the game (like Mario’s triple jump)

A new item

Using an existing system in a different way

Combining multiple existing mechanics in a new way

Adding a new rule (like time limit)

Now I’m not saying a new mechanic should be introduced every level, I’m not saying a level should start at 50% easier than the one before and be 150% harder by the end, I’m not saying a game should only be 4 levels long, I’m not saying that the increase each time should be the same (for example games that are easy to learn hard to master), I’m not saying mechanics should only be introduced at the start of a level, I’m not saying there should be only one new mechanic a level.

Smoothing the Curve

Our objective is still to “Smooth out the curve” and I know it looks like we have made this worse, but to be clear when we try and make it more gradual we are talking about removing outlying variances (either too hard or too easy) and giving each mechanic its own difficulty curve.

Why is This Graph Important?

Players want to feel like they are always progressing (both in their own skill and towards the end of the game) so the more time in your game they are going up this curve generally the better the game (this is a massive simplification I know)

If at any point your graph is too steep / shallow this is when people get frustrated / bored. Now there is a problem with the fact that each person will have their own unique gradient (and each puzzle will have a different learning curve per person as well).

Tricks for Keeping Everyone on the Right Part of the Curve:

DO:

Put in optional collectables

Provide tricky alternate routes that skips easy parts

Have areas that give you a better high score

Achievements that reward people playing with a disadvantage

Dynamically adjust the difficulty depending on how well the player is doing. Have multiple endings.

Allow people to grind for exp or practice if they feel they are not capable of an area.

Have multiple paths so if the player gets stuck they can do another task until they have the skills needed to go down the main path.

Make it obvious what equipment players need to be using for this puzzle (by giving it to them right away, giving them ammo for the needed weapon, colour coding things, removing previous equipment that is not needed for this puzzle)

Give people multiple ways to learn something (text, voice over, button prompt, particles showing where they need to go, environmental graphics, lighting, help popups, visual cues)

Give subtle graphical hints (In Mario there will be a little flower or coin where you need to start a jump)

Just visually show them (often in games before being given a new weapon you will see an enemy use it on the other side of a window, or you will see the kind of damage it has done to other NPCs in the room)

DON'T:

Don’t make the game easier for people who are doing better (for example putting skill points in an area only expert players can get to)

Don’t punish someone for doing bad and make future attempts harder

Don’t allow someone to skip an area if they...