Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
Consequently, you don't have to put as much effort into managing difficulty
throughout the game, so long as the game is fair. You still have to set the difficulty
of individual challenges posed by the environment in a multiplayer game, however.
The height of the basketball hoop and the size of the rim determine how hard it is
to shoot a ball through the hoop in absolute terms, but how hard it is to win the
game depends on the quality of the opposing team.
OFFERING CHEATS TO THE PLAYER
Many games try to account for differences in previous experience and native talent
among the players by offering so-called cheats: hidden options that the player may use
to gain an extra advantage. Cheats originally arose as a convenience feature for game
testers, allowing them to jump ahead in the game, bypass certain challenges, and so on,
so that they could go quickly to the part of the game they needed to test. Eventually
designers realized that players could benefit from cheats too, and they began to leave the
cheats as hidden features in the shipped version of the product. This practice is now so
widespread that it has become standard.
In spite of its ubiquity, however, if your design depends on the use of cheats, your game
is poorly balanced. If a player cannot get through a game without using a cheat, the
game is too hard. Instead of offering a hidden cheat that the player must search the
Internet to discover, simply build the cheat in as a normal feature of the game's easiest
difficulty mode and leave it out of the harder modes.
Types of Difficulty
Players care most about perceived difficulty ; what matters is how hard the player
finds surmounting a given challenge. To design a challenge at your target level of
perceived difficulty, you must take into account four factors: intrinsic skill required
and stress, both introduced in Chapter 9, as well as power provided and in-game
experience, defined shortly. We'll also examine absolute difficulty and relative dif-
ficulty, concepts that are helpful when you are trying to gauge in advance how
difficult players will find the challenges you design for them.
NOTE The designer
controls four key
factors that create
perceived difficulty:
intrinsic skill required,
stress, power provided
by the game, and
in-game experience.
The major factors the
designer cannot control
are previous experience
and native talent.
ABSOLUTE DIFFICULTY
To judge the absolute difficulty of a challenge, compare the amounts of intrinsic skill
required to meet the challenges and the stress that the challenge imposes on a triv-
ial challenge of the same type. For instance, in an action game, a trivial enemy
would stand still, could not harm the avatar, and could be killed with one punch. If
you design another enemy that takes more effort to kill (because it has more health
points), that moves around (requiring more intrinsic skill to hit), and that hits the
avatar back (thereby placing the player under time pressure—stress—to kill the
enemy before the enemy kills the avatar), you can be confident you have designed
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