IGIA Workshop 2 - Game Design - POST YOUR QUESTIONS

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Permalink Reply by Kjartan Akil Jónsson on January 8, 2010 at 10:44am

How do you incorporate increasing difficulty in a game. Do you do it through the game mechanics or the game design?
By game mechanics I mean the way an individual controls (you) the character as well as how (you) the character interacts with the world.
By game design I mean level design and the properties and items within the world you are interacting with.

For instance in Modern Warfare 2 (a great game) the game mechanics changed. In subsequent levels you are introduced to new weapons (where you control the projectile during flight) and could drive vehicles.
In Tetris the "game design" changed by reducing the time the player had to order the blocks.

How do you recommend introducing the player this difficulty? Is it through some sort of "boss fight" after each level? Or do you do it by introducing new "items" and challenging the player to use these items in a new way?

In our game we in fact have two ways to defeat the "evil" character. By infection (disease) and through physics (by hurting the character).
The first way is easier than the later, as such I was thinking to introduce the player to the "game mechanics" in that order.

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Permalink Reply by Páll Ívarsson on February 7, 2010 at 6:55pm

Kjartan Akil Jónsson said:

How do you incorporate increasing difficulty in a game. Do you do it through the game mechanics or the game design?
By game mechanics I mean the way an individual controls (you) the character as well as how (you) the character interacts with the world.
By game design I mean level design and the properties and items within the world you are interacting with.

For instance in Modern Warfare 2 (a great game) the game mechanics changed. In subsequent levels you are introduced to new weapons (where you control the projectile during flight) and could drive vehicles.
In Tetris the "game design" changed by reducing the time the player had to order the blocks.

How do you recommend introducing the player this difficulty? Is it through some sort of "boss fight" after each level? Or do you do it by introducing new "items" and challenging the player to use these items in a new way?

In our game we in fact have two ways to defeat the "evil" character. By infection (disease) and through physics (by hurting the character).
The first way is easier than the later, as such I was thinking to introduce the player to the "game mechanics" in that order.

Hey, sorry for the late reply to this.

Increasing the difficulty in a game really depends on the direction. I can't say it in black and white that I would always do it one way or the other. It would depend on the game.

I'm very interested in adaptive difficulty, where the actions of the player dictate the difficulity. So that if a player is performing above, or below a certain mean or average the difficulty is increased by some factor.

But I think it really depends on how you want things to progress for the player.

There is not much I can recommend as what can be done, there are so many ways. What is important is to find the right way for the game you are working on. What is good for game A, might not work at all for game B.

But I can say I like having multiple ways to progress within a game, so that the player has not just one arbitrary way of moving forward. If that is having a clever level design, where you either bash through a horde of enemies on route A, or you have to pick a lock on the other route, which takes more thinking or resourcefulness, but makes you skip the horde of enemies

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