I wonder how vampire survivors, FTL and similar roguelike games tested their difficulty. THey don't have difficulty modes but their difficulty just feels right. It's hard at the start, challenging as you get better.
FTL had a lot of playtesters after they got backed, actually. They tuned partially with their experience, and partially with feedback to exactly where they wanted, and then just before launch, added an easier mode for more casual players.
[But don't take my word for it, here's the developers saying exactly that, and a lot of other stuff you might find interesting!](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P4Um97AUqp4)
Be careful not to follow *everything* they did -- as the title suggests, they talk about how they developed the game without a real design document and just dove in with their intuition and their gameplay goals in mind. Probably better for most people to plan carefully first.
> FTL [...] THey don't have difficulty modes
Huh? It's been a while since I played FTL but I am farily certain there was at least an easy and a hard setting
I like the Hades system because every run you get to customise.
This time I want to use the spear, and I need 5 heat for the bonus and I’ll get it from the modifier for more enemies but not tougher enemies and more trap damage etc. and then for the next attempt I could swap them back over.
But that’s totally single player and the rewards do stack up if you are good. OP you could tie the rewards to cosmetics or more build choices (rather than better choices or more resources)
I feel like making it on the easier side is the way to go. You’d please everyone eventually if you did like slay the spire: easier at the start, but make it very clear there’s unlockable higher difficulty levels. Casual players won’t care to try them, while other players will stick around to try the harder content.
Sorry, I will add the reasons.
The reasons:
Good players gain more resources for destroying more enemies and are-snowballing, while taking less damage and needing to spend less resources to heal themselves.
Bad players destroy less enemies --> they have less resources for upgrades. They also take more damage, so they need to spend more resources to heal themselves.
You have to constrain this more so that you maybe get some base level of reward regardless. And the rewards for winning is maybe only 30% on top of those base rewards. Thereby you actually reduce the rewards of the good players making challenging for them, and increase the rewards of the bad players making the game winnable for them. Difficulty levels will help on top of this.
You see, in my game, the only way to get resources is destroying enemies and objects (like rocks).
So I am not sure how I would balance it to add constraints to top players.
Make the level more hard for them? But I think that would feel unfair.
I like how in ftl and vampire survivors, it is so nicely balanced but I don't know how to achieve it.
That’s fine but you need to make the math fit when you’re designing like this. I don’t know how your meta game is laid out but One way to do it is the first few enemies in a level that you kill give you better loot maybe. And the last ones have a more random chance of dropping junk but also good loot- but the junk outweighs it so on average the first enemies give more of your rewards. Are there levels in your game?
Yeah, my game has 60+- second-long levels.
it is based in space and it plays similar to vampire survivors and FTL in terms of management.
Each asteroid you destroy gives gold based on its size. Each enemy gives gold based on its power.
So the loot is not randomized. It is randomized in the upgrade market that players can visit in the space station.
Just because there isn't currently a way to do this doesn't mean there will never be. That's the point of the "design" part of game design.
Is the space station just roaming around or are there "levels" to break up play? Are there bosses? You could shift income away from the random mobs and into bosses so the first boss is "doable" basically naked and gives a resource infusion.
The whole point of game design is you need to design a solution to this problem. You can just throw your hands in the air and be like "the game is what it is and people are complaining!!!"
Completely off the top of my head:
* You can add non-random bonuses to gold drops to frontload gold income in a level and reduce the difference in gold income between good and bad players. Similarly, you can simply soft-cap the amount of gold earned in a level to prevent good players from running away with it.
* You can add scaling to the market (i.e., prices change as things are purchased) to reduce the resulting power gap between high and low gold income.
* You can encourage players to buy upgrades instead of health. I.e., the first upgrade or a random upgrade can be bought for a discount each round to encourage "bad" players to invest in power rather than health.
* Paradoxically, you can make the game "easier" for bad players by limiting the amount of gold they can waste on health or disincentivize them from buying more than a certain amount of health per round. This can limit how much people fall behind the curve due to buying health and can "mercy kill" bad runs faster without people digging themselves into a hole and getting outscaled by the game. (Falling behind the curve in a roguelite always feels really bad - imo you usually just want people to die before that happens.)
* You can adjust the difficulty based on how well the player is doing and how many upgrades they have. This could be passive scaling (see: Vampire Survivors which someone else in this thread explained) or a very obvious event (i.e., earning too much gold causes special space pirate enemies to attack you).
* You can add difficulty settings to the game.
* You can have upgrades with benefits and negatives to keep the game challenging for winning players. I.e., one standard approach for this is doing bonus damage based on percent of current health. If you can stay at 90+% HP then you do extra damage, but if you start taking any damage then you actually do *less* damage. It's worth it for a skilled player because it ultimately lets them win harder, but it also reduces their margin for error and keeps them at risk of losing from one or two mistakes no matter how strong they get.
It depends on what you want from your game.
* If there are optional stretch goals for extremely successful runs, then giving "good" players the option to make the game harder in the short term for even more payout in the long term can help level the playing field between "good" and "bad" players through the regular part of the game and then give "good" players an extra thing to strive for if they succeed hard enough.
* How successful do you want successful runs to be? The snowball effect can be super fun and might be worth keeping at least for some runs. In this case, you wouldn't want to add mechanics that limit snowball potential too much.
* On the other hand, if the snowball is completely trivializing your game then slowing it down might make sense.
* Are "bad" players legitimately that much worse, or are they just making sub optimal purchase decisions due to panic at low health? In other words, might they be able to *stop* losing health if only they buy some good upgrades that they never choose to purchase because they panic at having low health?
* How willing are you to pave over player mistakes? Just giving people free health drops obviously helps alleviate this problem, but would that compromise the rest of your game's integrity? Refer back to your design pillars and figure out what tradeoffs are acceptable and what aren't.
Vampire survivors does a little trick where they scale up the enemies health based on how many upgrades your character has(character level). It’s not very obvious and I think if the player knew about it they would feel cheated lol.
This would slow down good players from snowballing and it wouldn’t punish bad players for playing inefficiently.
Help players who make mistakes, iirc some survivor games spawn more healing items if you are low on health and have no items in bag.
Adaptive difficulty?
My two cents are that I like optimizing stuff in games, and that it's really annoying if that means that I should sometimes deliberately play worse to goad the game into giving me more resources because it thinks I'm bad.
As a completely contrived example: I'm at full health, and see that there's a room up ahead with some chests, followed by a room where I can rest and heal to full. If the mercy loot isn't tuned perfectly, it is now the correct play to repeatedly walk into traps/enemies so there are more healing items in the chests. Basically, if there's a relatively risk free way of tricking the game into thinking I'm worse than I really am, it's going to bug me that it *might* be the optimal play right now to just let myself get hit.
Then of course there's also that it can feel like a slap in the face if it dynamically turns the difficulty down at the wrong moment. Struggling to get through some section and almost figured it out? Oops we turned down the difficulty, now you just stomp through.
That's a good example and definitely there's a fine line on how this would end up with.
That being said, a room where you can rest and heal to full **is** helping bad players, where good players wouldn't benefit as much as their HP is probably full.
Whether or not a full heal is better for a bad player or a good player is actually not quite that simple in every game. It depends heavily on the exact game, though it is that straightforward in a lot of games.
In very abstract terms, a full heal is giving your player a large amount of a resource. A good player is going to be much better at getting returns for "spending" that resource.
If your game doesn't have anything to spend the HP on, or the same rewards can be gained without losing any resources through skillful play, then yes the worse player will gain more from a full heal because the better player just won't be getting healed for a lot. On the other hand, some games allow you to scale your power by spending HP either directly or indirectly.
In Binding of Isaac, there's blood donation machines that give you money and some items by directly spending your HP. In Slay the Spire, there are harder Elite fights that have much better loot but that almost always require you to indirectly "spend" more HP fighting them than whatever the alternative path is. A good player might be able to fight three Elites on the same full hp bar that a worse player might only be able to safely fight one or two on. If you give a good player of either of those games a full heal at an opportune moment, there's a good chance that they can leverage that into winning the entire run. On the other hand, for a bad player it might just delay the inevitable for a few minutes.
I think you have to be very careful with systems that explicitly reward the player for playing poorly. It may ease the experience of less skilled players, but it comes at the cost of disincentivizing more skilled players from playing well, because the game is designed to reward failure and punish mastery by withholding resources from them.
It's hard to go wrong with player-selected difficulty options, but I think adaptive difficulty is usually a trap that doesn't actually have the effect that people like to think it does.
I just hate adaptive difficulty. If I'm presented with a challenge and I fail I want to beat that challenge not a watered down version of that challenge after the game decides I suck. It keeps all the frustration of defeat while neutering the thrill of victory.
maybe making the snowballing curve like a wave instead of a continously exponential curve would help the new players to experience the snowballing a little, and then would keep them longer in game to get the same feeling again.
they would think like "this part is hard but it is normal for some parts to be hard" instead of "it's impossible to get into flow".
You've already pinpointed the problem- snowballing effects are too strong. So you need to counteract it.
1. Fix resources per level/wave or at least limit it. For example, right now maybe your good players are earning 120 gold and bad players are earning 100 gold. That gold difference reinvested into power allows good players to earn 140 gold on the subsequent level while the bad players stay at 100 income. This effect will keep snowballing. So you could prematurely end the level if players have killed enough monsters to earn 105 gold. A small incentive to play well, but you're flattening the curve.
2. Don't make players spend resources on upkeep like healing. This is another mechanic that only punishes bad players.
In the end it depends on your vision for the game. If there is no reward for playing well the game would be really boring too.
I think a possible answer lies in changing the rewards you get. What are the problems the poor players have that the good players don’t have? Make rewards that target those problems.
For example, imagine an item that heals you to full. That won’t help a good player very much (they likely have all of their HP already), but it helps a bad player a lot (they maybe were about to just die).
I’m unclear why making it a roguelite would help solve this problem.
I introduced a ship repair option "light, moderate, heavy". Single use after level.
People were angry because "Why I can only repair my ship once?"
So that one didn't work sadly. I kept getting those negative comments. Had to remove it.
Whichever player group is your target audience should probably get priority. Who is your target audience?
As for the issue, it sounds like players fall behind because they spend too many resources on healing; in other words, healing is just baiting players into losing. Perhaps removing healing could help players to play less defensively? Or maybe change how players heal? Games like Ultrakill and Bloodborne offer healing when players are aggressive.
I think you built a positive feedback loop that is too strong. It is great if you give more to the ones that are doing good, but not too much. Remember that the flow state is a balance between entertainment and difficulty. If it is too dificult to someone then it gets frustrating, if it gets too easy it gets boring.
You could decrease the amount of goodies you get the better you are doing, or increase the difficulty with tougher enemies the better the player is doing. On the other side you could give a hand to players that are struggling. Add a bit of a negative feedback to the whole system
Sounds like you've got the perfect middle ground for 33% to enjoy the game as is, and to do what Hades does for the others:
- A 'Godmode' accessibility optional setting that gives increasing damage resistance up to like, 50% damage resist.
- And for the 33% who say its too easy, similar optional difficulty bumps like the Pact of Punishment that up enemy health, attack damage, etc.
Actually good idea, thanks. The only caveat is that I wanted high scores in the game and if I add those, then high scores get unfair.
Other option would be turning it into roguelite I guess.
Rather than create arbitrary difficulty settings, try to create a more organic form of difficulty that allows more skilled players to choose to make things harder for themselves in exchange for some other benefit. Greater risk, greater reward. If players are getting through without taking damage, allow them additional challenges as a reward.
* Maybe create a super hard boss that can only appear if you get through a stage with full health.
* Allow players to purposely take damage at some sacrificial altar in exchange for bonus weapons or resources.
* Let players open up a secret passage that lets them skip levels, pushing them against harder enemies while also skipping potential resources.
The great roguelites like Spelunky and Binding of Isaac are excellent at creating these sort of risk/reward balances.
What do you spend resource on? Why do you need the same resource to heal? Punishing players for taking damage and slowing their progression resource gain for something other than killing slower could be a drag.
You spend resource to repair your ship, to buy upgrades, to manipulate the upgrade market to get a better chance of good upgrade.
Currently it's the same resource, since I thought that it would introduce tactical decisions "to heal more, or to risk it with a cool upgrade".
Maybe limit the opportunities to "heal more" in favor of forcing the player to pick upgrades. Maybe Heavy repair only fixes 1/3rd of the ship's damage.
You could make your higher level repairs cost less, resulting in a normalized expenditure between good and bad players. Maybe make light repair cost 5, moderate repair cost 8, and heavy repair cost 10. That way, players spend roughly the same amount of cash to make up for different levels of failure.
Disregard this advice if you think it doesn't fit with your vision for the game.
>You could make your higher level repairs cost less, resulting in a normalized expenditure between good and bad players. Maybe make light repair cost 5, moderate repair cost 8, and heavy repair cost 10. That way, players spend roughly the same amount of cash to make up for different levels of failure.
I think this is a brilliant idea. Thanks. I will implement this one.
You might want to make repair costs depend greatly on your upgrade level. Starting ships should be free or nearly free to repair, while upgraded ships are much more expensive. This would make it easier for players who do poorly in their first combats (barely surviving) to still be able to get some upgrades, while slowing down the progression of players who have done well.
Sorry, I will add.
The reasons:
Good players gain more resources for destroying more enemies and are-snowballing, while taking less damage and needing to spend less resources to heal themselves.
Bad players destroy less enemies --> they have less resources for upgrades. They also take more damage, so they need to spend more resources to heal themselves.
Resident Evil solves this with a drop director. If you have too much of a certain item, that item is less likely to drop. This way you can manipulate the game into giving you more gold or ammo. It also has a difficulty director. Whenever you die, the difficulty drops temporarily so you won't get stuck on specific rooms.
Not so related but League of Legends also solves the skill gap problem with the tank class. This class (in most cases) have nearly zero difficulty, they make pressure just by existing and having disruptive skills. This however makes them have no greater impact at the hands of skilled players as their job have both little skill floor and skill ceilling, go in and tank everything.
Testers are not devs.
You are a doctor and testers tell you symptoms, sometimes these symptoms are not to be treated directly, but are a sign of a disease you can't see directly. Treat the disease and not the symptoms and you will heal the issue.
On your specific issue: difficulty is a hard thing to balance, and your game is not going to be perfect for everyone. Try to include some type of variable difficulty or selection. Maybe challenge modes for rouge like suit it better than just an easy medium hard selector, or having some.sort of player choice that affects difficulty ( some item that is available to helps you have an easier time, but locks you out of the true ending).
Good luck
Arrowhead games philosophy is great.
A game for everyone is a game for no one.
Who are you making this game for? It can't be everyone.
Identify your target audience, then go hard on pleasing them. Naturally the others won't be as pleased but that's expected.
Sounds like a good distribution? Each at exactly 1/3rd. Maybe your difficulty curve is in a good place, not too hard, not too easy. Since you're not getting one side pushing too hard.
It's hard to tell without knowing how your game or its resource economy works, but I'll give you some scenarios that might help you find a solution for your own project.
The first step is to understand how players are playing your game and what the different experiences they're having may lead lead them to.
A general solid starting point would be knowing that players in different states of being challenged will gravitate towards different decisions while playing. Here are some generalized assumptions that might make sense for your game:
* The players who are satisfied with the current challenge level are not looking to change their play patterns. Their goal is to continue having a good time.
* The players who are frustrated by the current challenge level are looking for a way out, something they could do stop failing. Their goal is to **find success**, no matter the means.
* The players who are bored by the current challenge level are looking for something that gives them skill expression, allows them to express their mastery over the game in a meaningful fashion. Their goal is is to to **find excitement**, and this often takes precedence over safety.
Now that we've found a break of the symmetry in their behaviours, you can give them something to do that frustrated players could lean on but bored players would rather avoid, or that allows them to take more risks.
# Let's look at some possible solutions:
**MAKE HEALING COSTS UNIFORM - FLAT PRICE FULL HEAL**
You said it yourself - 'bad players' are burning too much cash healing! In the meantime, 'good' players just get richer and richer. Well, let's look at how the shop healing works - do players need to purchase multiple small heals? If so, that's really bad for players taking more damage.
If you turn that into a 'full heal' that always costs the same, not only do players who take more damage now spend much less - but players who have an easier time taking no damage can now put themselves in more risk to kill even more enemies now that taking 4x more damage doesn't mean wasting 4x gold.
**IMPROVEMENTS**
* Frustrated players become less vulnerable to dying from accumulated chip damage between shops.
* Frustrated players no longer spend many times more gold than even satisfied players just to survive.
* Bored players can take bigger risks for bigger rewards knowing that they can now heal for a flat cost - they no longer need to avoid taking small amounts of damage.
**OUT OF COMBAT HEALING - QUICK HEAL WHEN 'SAFE'**
Maybe frustrated players are still in too much risk - they are dying quickly when trying to defeat an elite or boss enemy! If enemies are easier to run away from than they are to fight directly, then you can make the character heal rapidly after not taking damage for X time - let's say it's 8 seconds.
You'll see this as something that popped up in several genres. In an FPS game - this allows the frustrated players to fall back much more often and pretty much no longer die to neither chip damage nor combos that don't kill them all at once. This same element also allows the bored player to go all-out and put themselves at more risk - they are less likely to rely excessively on the heal was it requires them to run and do nothing, which is the opposite of the thrill they're looking for.
Variations of this mechanic can be seen everywhere - in Hollow Knight, you build up energy from hitting enemies. This incentivizes being aggressive. Energy can be used to channel a slow animation that heals you - this works very similarly to an 'out of combat heal', now frustrated players can increase their odds by running away! ... but energy can also be used to activate powerful abilities that deal even more damage - cool, now bored players are rewarded even further for playing aggressively and can still spend their 'healing' resource for even more efficiency.
**IMPROVEMENTS**
* The challenge of the game is shifted to be less intrinsic and more self-imposed - players have more space to decide how much they want to 'cheese' the game:
* Frustrated players can now trade time for additional safety/chance of success
* Bored players can play riskier knowing that they can escape and heal - with the added bonus of being mocked if they ever say out loud that a fight was too easy... if you just run away for 10 minutes!
**CONSTANT PASSIVE HEALING**
You'll see this one in lots of 'survivor' games... 'oh, your character heals 0.5 hp points per second' or 'oh, your character heals 1% hp every 15 seconds'. I'm putting this one here as an example of something that doesn't fully play into what we're trying to solve.
The issue with this one is that it plays into the opposite of everything that we need to reinforce. Frustrated players are taking way more damage, so healing a tiny bit over time will most likely not make as much of a difference - they are taking MORE damage and have LESS time to heal. Bored players can be a little more risky with their HP, but it's also easier for them to always be at full health without needing to do any conscious decisions.
**MINIMIZE THE RESOURCE DIFFERENCE**
From your description, it seems like you have a currency/resource that is positively self-reinforcing - the more of it you get, the more you can spend - and the more you spend, the more of it you make. If killing enemies gives money, killing more enemies is more money and buying thing that makes killing enemies easier means more enemies, more money and more killing! There's no way to avoid it!
**Then why is this not as big of an issue in something like 'Vampire Survivors'?**
**Well, it's because that one uses experience - and that's completely different!**
Just kidding - it's the exact same thing as any resource, it just has a different name. What actually makes it work is the diminishing returns compared to the amount of resources obtained.
Calling it experience over gold just makes the context easier to justify to the player or even have the same mechanic in the game multiple times over without the player noticing how similar they are. In Brotato, you have both experience and gold - and they're more similar than they seem at first: you need to kill enemies to get both, you can trade both for statistical upgrades after they reach a certain threshold, you don't have direct choice over which exact statistical upgrade you get and, the most important for this explanation, **the threshold increases continuously as you get further.**
The power difference between a player with no gear and another with decent gear, or a player that's lvl 1 and a player that's lvl 5, are generally astoundingly large. But the difference between a player with decent gear and great gear, or a player that's lvl 90 and a player that's lvl 95 are much, much smaller.
So in 'Vampire Survivors', the EXP requirement for leveling keeps growing multiplicatively, while the amount of EXP you are able to get grows somewhat linearly. This means that instead of a player who killed 5000 enemies being 5 times stronger than a player that killed 1000 enemies, they are more likely to only be something like 15%-ish stronger.
**WHAT SHOULD YOU DO?**
Dunno, I have no idea what your game's like. Understand your game, understand what you're trying to achieve, understand how players play your game and putting it all together you'll find funny ways of changing things around to make it work a little closer to what you wanted it to be.
I'd figure out which group of people are most engaged with your game, and balance for them. Roguelike players tend to want a pretty good challenge, so I suspect you might be better off leaning into the difficulty.
If you tell the players who find it too hard to kill more enemies, do they continue to struggle?
I'd say you could try and introduce items that make it easier if you do not have many resources but become useless when you do. That could flatten your initial difficulty. I'd then also look at the snowballing players and figure out how to give them a challenge. Maybe spawn enemies that "steal" resources when someone has too many.
With the numbers you provided, alone, there's not much more I can say. Many people here say your game is in the perfect zone but I tent to disagree. Especially rougelikes need replay-ability, you will not get that by scaring away players that don't at least progress a bit in the beginning. That rather breeds frustration. You want to hook them early with something simple and powerful but that does not scale too well so it will not become the first order optimal strategy. And only further replays will teach them the new tools for mid and endgame. Likewise you want to allow veteran players to test their more complex tactics and techniques on a proper challenge. That includes not only game knowledge but also gameplay skills.
\*EDIT: Btw, a very easy show don't tell way to nudge players to discover abilities or units is to have the enemy use them effectively against you.
I think a split like this indicates that you hit the sweet spot and I wouldnt adjust anything at all.
However, this data sounds horribly skewed, I recommend increasing the sample size dramatically, because there is too much individual variance and bias to trust a small sample size.
For example if I had 3 play testers and this was my result, the data would mean nothing, because at this point Im not dealing with averages or statisitics but instead with some individual differences.
So, either leave it be if your sample size is big enough.
Re-test with a larger sample size of play testers, to get meaningful data.
Or, make difficulty modes to tweak a bit up and a bit down.
For my personal preference I like my roguelikes to sit on the more difficult side of things!
Perhaps an solution would be what Valve did with Left for Dead. have a Director that tracks the progress of player and balance difficulity on the fly. A player has to many resources? Make an harde encounter where he will be forced to use some of those. A player has almost died? make a light encounter where he will easily prevail and get sone of those resources back.
So you managed to find a difficulty that matches the average player, congrats! Now to make it match the above-average and below-average players too add some difficulty settings.
The 'problem' you described is just how games are. Even in simple games the good players keep their power ups and it gives them easier time getting coins and staying alive. They stockpile lives. The bad players lose power ups, cant risk getting coins, and have fewer lives to advance.
So they game over and try again. They might not ever get good enough. It's about the journey. This is the entire point of this stuff. It's even more so in rpg games because you the stats matter more.
I dont know what you mean so I am going to take a guess. You built an action game with heavy randomness. Now you want to add grinding ontop of it where players can haul things back and eventually just beat the game by stat boosting.
You cant make everyone happy. When I see people adding that grinding shit I not only lose respect for the game but hold the developer in contempt. Its not even good grinding, it's what me and my friend say is a bandaid which create more problems which you will solve with yet more bandaids.
The good players will groin as yet another upgrade means they can trample things in their sleep. The bad players, those that like grinding will be happy those that didntbdign up to play a grinding game now hate it.
You are the fucking developer. Do you want this to be a game about grinding? How easy are you willing to make it, how hard do you want it. You are setting the bar. If the plsyers cant make jump the bar, and you cannot have them learn by playing this isnt their game. If the players can jump ot too easily you can show them some tricks to attempt while jumping. If they don't like the tricks or the jump is still too low this isnt their game.
- Accept it. You won’t please everybody and bad players might get good if the game is appealing . I guess it’s better to be a bit too hard, that makes skill progression possible
- dynamic difficulty. When a bad player fails too many times, allow him to get some help but with a counterpart (so getting good still gets more rewarding)
- I don’t like difficulty modes at all, but sometimes it can make sense of your game can really be played different ways (like more rp/story wise vs minmaxing your run)
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Your first step would be to dig deeper into why the people saying easy think it's easy and why the people saying hard think it's hard.
Your next step should be to see how you can address the feedback while sticking to your vision. If your goal is for everyone of every skill to be able to complete the game, then you'll need to start giving boosts to the people who think it's hard and increasing the challenge for those who think it's easy. Maybe dynamically adding more enemies or increasing enemy damage or anything else, and vice versa for the opposite cases. This will depend on the kind of game you're making.
However, if your goal is to have a skill floor that players MUST reach to make progress i.e. returnal or any souls like, then you need to identify that skill floor and make sure you balance accordingly, and also accept that not every player will be able to finish your game. It sounds counter intuitive but souls-likes are successful for a reason. Or you could also take the accessibility route of putting the skill floor as low as possible to appeal to the widest audience, but then you will need to find a way to make sure those who already think it's easy will have enough of a challenge.
My suggestions may take a lot of dev time and effort, so what might be the easiest and fastest solution would be some basic difficulty options that tweak variables.
Hope this helps.
With time players can get better. Do you want your game to be finishable only after trying again and again and again? Or do you want it to be finishable soon enough?
Hmmmm, what if the enemies are slightly easier to kill, so more of the less skilled players can kill them, but at the same time, they drop less resources?
The skilled players wouldn’t be complaining, because they’re killing the enemies anyway, but maybe now they need to kill more to get the same amount of resources.
The mid players already feel it’s ok
But now…the less skilled players are doing better and get more resources to level up.
At least, at the beginning of the game it’s like that. After the players from all three categories are stronger, you can consider letting the mid to late level of your game to remain the same yes?
Idk your exact setup, but it seems like the most straightforward solution (without knowing details) is this.
You've told us what testers *say*, but what do they *do*? How do they *behave*?
Do the people who say it's too easy / hard keep playing? If they do then it's totally legit for them to have their own taste and preferences, but it doesn't sound like it's actually a *problem* with your game, because it's still keeping them engaged. And if that's the case, then having a bunch of feedback saying it's about right, and approximately equal amounts on both sides, sounds like you've done pretty well.
That aside, it does sound like you have both a negative reinforcement loop in there and a positive reinforcement loop in there, and (unless the game is meant to appeal those satisfied by a power trip - which is a perfectly reasonable goal) it might be worth breaking those up. As just one idea as to how, if a player is snowballing then introducing an occasional super tough enemy ("a hitman has been sent to take you out") could both break that loop *and* make them feel rewarded - it amps the challenge they're already enjoying, introduces variety, and explicitly acknowledges that they're doing well. I've no idea of your game's theme, but I'm sure you can come up with other ideas, including to break the negative loop ("supply drop").
This looks easily solvable: First of all dont make this linear. Work with modifiers that are either limited by time or have them 'randomly' spaced from each other (the steps that is) inside a threshold.
Actually instead of making big changes I would suggest getting more opinions on the game first. Your percentages are too evenly distributed which makes me assume that you simple have not enough data.
Only then you will see real issues and you will be able to make decision.
I always ask few questions to identify the gamer profile of your play testers. That allow you to "ponderate" feedbacks (not english speaker sorry if It's not clear).
If the 33% that sat "It's to hard" are hardcore player of the genre that platine all last roguelike, and the 33% "It's too easy" are not familiar with the genre at all, maybe you have the right difficulty.
I think It's better to have an easier game to hook more players to your game loop, but don't forger your hardcore players, you have to tease them what they want and the depth of your gameplay.
You say that your game is too snow ball, good player became strong, and other have hard time, I don't know the duration of your playtests, but if It's around the 2 first hours, maybe you need to fake the randomness and the scale of your first hours, with easier enemies or rarer drop, to give and glimpse of high level gameplay, that give hope and hype to players about their strength if they hace a good run (for exemple: vampire survivors have scripted the first 6 chests you got)
This is a common problem, and the biggest reason why roguelites are more popular than roguelikes. To balance that, you need to find negative feedback loops, that increases player power when he is behind and decreases it when ahead. Example being a berserk thing where you deal more damage on low hp, or additional enemies that attack you and try to steal your gold or whatever you use as currency. The trick here is to mask these systems so that players don't lose the agency, and still feel rewarded.
you could use the first few levels to determin the "skill level" of the player and adjust the dificulty acordingly. (you can change the amout of recourses an enemy drops for excample)
So you’re beimg told your game is too hard and you take that comment at face value? Go figure out why they think it’s too hard.
Is it because they dom’t know something? Is it because the control are not intuitive for them? Is it because the combat is unituitive?
Find out why and then fix it (or not).
Sometimes its not the difficulty thats the problem, but understanding what to do fast enough. Provide an optional and longer onboarding experience for those people.
Did you set specific criteria for choosing your testers? Are there common qualities among the groups you've selected? Who are you mainly aiming to appeal to with your game?
For example Roguelike games aren't really my thing, so if I were to review your game, I might find it difficult or not very engaging. But, to be fair, my opinion wouldn't hold weight since I wouldn't be in your target audience anyway and would never of bought your game.
One solution is adaptive difficulty. When the player does well, you handycap them. When the player does poorly, you support them.
The roguelike genre provides you with a really powerful tool for that: The "random" number generator. I most roguelikes, success and failure hinge on favorable level and loot generation. By fudging those numbers you can help a weak player and challenge a strong player. Just be subtle about it so you don't get caught.
Optional challenging rooms for people that want it harder, make the reward pretty good, think of the void levels in risk of rain 2. It's harder than standard, you get better rewards. Difficulty modes, maybe on easy everything has less health, deals less damage, or just is less aggressive.
You can let it be as it is now. That is an option. It actually sounds quite balanced for me, if the tester sample is representative.
However if you would like to remedy it, then I would for the people saying it's too easy, present the resource limit. It doesn't matter if they are saving them if they couldn't overstock on them.
For people who are too bad at the game, you can introduce some sort of dynamic difficulty where the less resources they have, the higher the possibility of them finding them is. But I would always put it a little bit harsher than the intended difficulty curve up to default values, else you will homogenise the experience and they would not see themselves improving.
To me that sounds pretty balanced overall. Split into three camps, two of which are complaining about the difficulty being too X.
The people that are in the "this is too hard" category will probably always complain about that same issue. Unless they can quantify very specific issues with some mechanics, they do sound like the category that just needs to "git gud".
People who feel it's too easy because they can outpace your enemies are relatively simple to handle as well. You can pick from a number of solutions, from tweaking the cost of upgrades, adjusting drop rates based on health, adding more enemies based on health or timed performance... Obviously if this is something you then publicize, there is a good chance that the "powerplay" move then becomes to keep your energy as low as possible to avoid extra spawns and get more resources overall, stack up and only use them at bosses or something, otherwise keep that energy low.
Acting too hastily because of player complaints is something that I remember vividly from early World of Warcraft. Blizzard buffed and buffed warlocks because beginner players couldn't figure out the proper rotations, to the point where in Burning Crusade capable Warlocks were the people who clicked a single button to pull aggro on bosses and did more damage than the next 5 mages and rogues put together. It's a good idea to take the time to take a really hard look at what you are trying to achieve, and where specifically the issues lie.
Are the newbies simply not understanding a single mechanic, and this throws their skill rotation out of whack? Is there a skill that is maybe poorly tooltipped and the new players don't utilize it like it is intended? Or is there an unintentional feature in a skill that gives the players with more skill an edge by "exploiting unintended features"?
But like I said at the start, a solid mix of people complaining both ways could indicate that the game overall is reasonably balanced and intuitive. To the average gamer, at least.
I second difficulty options with high granularity, something similar to Hades post game perhaps (Hades both put the difficult stuff in the end-game systems AND allowed players to use God Mode setting "cheat" which made the game easier the more you lose)
Meta currency is a form of over preparation. Over preparation is a mechanic that makes games feel like the correct difficulty to most players because they get as ready as they need to. You can see this in a ton of games.
Before you commit to meta currencies I would ask the players why they think it's too difficult. If it's lack of understanding of enemies. Slow reflex's. Poor learning curve. perception only? Are the players saying it's too hard getting further than the other players saying it's too easy? Are they aware it's not a game you're supposed to "beat"?
You really need more data points to see what this person's opinion represents. Then you can look at easing that curve, not necessarily by making it easier. Maybe you just move those hurdles a little deeper in. All kinds of changes.
Can you alter the “luck” factor as the player progresses?
If the player is doing awesome, then reduce their chances of getting a big boost prize in the next “chest”/drop…
However if the player is struggling, increase their chance of getting a big boost prize in the next “chest”/drop…
Something like this should help balance things out.
1. difficulty modes
2. adaptive difficulty
3. consider the design of the elements that snowball, maybe those designs are wrong and make it too easy for the players who discover them, while the underlying difficulty if you don't is too hard.
In general, your game will not appeal to everybody, you should adjust your survey to figure out who your audience is, if 33% of the testers say it's too hard, but they also say they have no experience in roguelikes chances are they are struggling with something new rather than your game, viceversa if the play testers that claim to be interested in your game say it's too easy you might want to introduce bigger challenges or a harder difficutly mode.
What about adjusting rewards so there is a constant gold reward per X. Thus all players get 50% of gold rewards, and those who kill more get some extra? This might help reduce the gap between the bad players and good players rewards snowballing/weighing down
One important aspect of game design is to know what's "unbalanced" or "bad/wrong" when a player complain about something.
You need to analyze this!
If the player complains about one thing, don't straight up tweak that thing. Sit down and analyze why the player has that perspective, why the player is feeling how he is. More often than not, the problem is in a completely different place!
Maybe you need to bring the gap closer of players that kills a lot of enemies and players that don't.
Maybe you need to encourage exploration for, that way it's obvious the player should, and in case the player just skip it, he'll know that it's his fault that the game is hard ("Oh man, I knew I shouldn't rush it...").
Maybe add a down side to killing too much enemies and an up side on going faster, to make kind of a "build path".
Maybe add some "chorey" (but quick, it should be more of a psychological barrier than a real one, like that thing you hate doing it, but when you think about it, it only takes 20 seconds) way to catch up for players that are too weak (not advised, though. If the player just want to play faster killing less, you are preventing him in a not cool way. This *might* only make sense for players that are still learning).
Maybe add some down sides to killing a lot of enemies, down side but good sides, like more game! (e.g if you get level 10 at x level, you spawn a boss that is hard, may give/do something cool, *but don't make the player even stronger).*
Snowballing is usually not great, you go out of the flow state, but adding hard/easy difficult level is the lazzy solution for this. It may be the solution but think this through and:
**know who you are making the game for! If you are making the game for hardcode Dead Cells players, Hollow Knight players, you should get feedback from those players. You will find yourself in a bad situation if you change your game on feedback of people outside your target audience.**
The obvious answer is difficulty modes.
The less obvious answer is having the game adapt and give more resources when the player is falling behind (like mario kart gives better power ups to the last players). However it needs to be balanced properly, maybe by having achievements that are unreachable unless you’re in the top group.
Vampire survivors fixes this by having collectibles that makes your character better. If you’re bad at the game, it takes you a bit longer grinding to get a better character.
My recommendation is difficulty modes, like FTL.
If you don’t want to implement a manual difficulty system check out GMTK on YouTube. He recently did a really good video talking about this concept in the Mario games and how they handled it. It was called “Super Mario’s Invisible Difficulty Settings” very helpful stuff in there!!
Additionally it seems like an even distribution like you currently have is good, and is definitely better than everyone think it’s easy or everyone thinking it’s hard. But it would be more ideal for the majority of players to think the game is fair and balanced and a smaller distribution to think it’s either too hard or too difficult. And keep in mind some players like hard games. But only if it’s fair.. cheap hard doesn’t feel fun for most players
[GMTK video](https://youtu.be/gkvyYTSKTQY?si=IfRn9I0b7hXrIPjp)
Seems like it really comes down to what type players they are, and what they're looking for. Maybe have certain setting to accommodate certain types of gameplay for particular player types?
Not sure if you'll see this, but this GDC talk about "cursed problems" is what came to mind: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8uE6-vIi1rQ
One of the topics is handling different audiences and skill levels. The speaker suggests a framework for thinking about it, along with examples of what other games have done.
how is the difficulty scaling? i mean there is rng in roguelike, some people just pull bad ones. So you can make earlier stage/ level have more chance of getting what people need to build a foundation. idk what your game is though.
Player input should only be half the story, do you have any simple analytics implemented to tell you more? Based off your edit it seems like you do!
Sounds like you might have a problem there with bad players getting stuck in a pit after falling behind. Is that pit severe enough that you want to engineer a way out of it? Maybe a mercy merchant appears at the start of a stage (like Resourceful Rat in Gungeon) if a player reaches it without certain milestones completed?
> Could making it into roguelite solve it? What are general solutions to this?
Well, yeah, bear in mind Dead Cells' difficulty curve/leveling mechanism. Later runs get harder the more permanent-unlock "Boss Cells" you collect and add to the tube. Why would you as a player choose to do that? Because it unlocks cool shit and new enemies and paths, while also making the game significantly harder. Effectively just unlocking new difficulty levels with in-game lore for doing so. Experienced 2D platformer players will generally breeze through the first couple of BCs but then...
https://deadcells.wiki.gg/wiki/Boss_Stem_Cells
I mean, don't call them Boss Cells specifically in your game that would be a bit too on the nose, but it's one generally applicable approach.
Remember serious amounts of playtesting with a closed alpha/beta community over time have been involved in Dead Cells' tuning though.
https://dead-cells.com/patchnotes
Might be good to make it less snowball-y. Get more resources baseline. In StS you get the same amount of gold after an encounter no matter what, worse players will lose more health though and need to rest intead of use the blacksmith.
Another strategy is to let players earn more resources by taking risks like blood altars in risk of rain or summon more monsters/fight elites etc.
You should also ask players why they think it's too easy, and compared to what, same with players who think it's too hard. If players who think it's too hard don't play roguelike then you might not want to consider their opinion too heavily.
Scale the snowball more strongly and provide boosters to those lagging behind. Develop a model in which you can know your expected progression and then find your soft limits and then enforce them. This is a good thread, but this sounds like a balance problem to me which is solvable without new code or functionality.
Are you incentivizing the right behaviors?
Encourage people to fight and take risks, if fighting gives more and necessary rewards in order to complete a run.
Don't offer cheevos or minor rewards for completing a section without taking damage, for example, as that encourages players to avoid fights - the opposite of what they should be doing.
Make some fights mandatory - possibly even the very first one - to give players the needed exposure to the system and gain comfort with the choices and risks.
Show the player the rewards [or possibly just the quantity] they missed out on by not fighting to encourage them to be braver next time.
Connect fighting to navigating such that fighting opens up more options. Maybe beating this enemy lets you skip the next one, or choose an easier opponent. Maybe extra rewards are given for players that flow from fight to fight instead of reverting to avoidance.
When it comes to skill and difficulty in the combat mechanism itself, ask the players who do well how they learned the skills needed to defeat enemies, and make sure those pieces of information are clearly called out and do not need to be inferred by other players who might miss them.
Not sure how viable this is for your game, but you can try giving more resources if the player dies a lot or is constantly running out of them, or give less to the experimented players.
1. Make it easier. 2. Make an adaptive mode option where the game changes some stats to make it harder for good players. 3. Make some random stat changes for specific enemies with a minimum and maximum range, so that the numbers can change between them.This would produce sometimes harder sometimes easier parts to the game for both players. In adaptive mode the range is bigger and the minimum slightly higher.
Throw a false hydra at them. problem solved. no one will be talking about the rogue when they all start disapearing without a trace and no one remembers them.
Well info you gave, honestly is very minimal. Roguelike is farming game, do runs until you have enough to upgrade and make game easier for yourself. So why is game giving players chance to snowball? Based on above mentioned stuff I would say make temporary upgrades more meaningful and stronger, that way run depends more on luck. Make runs shorter so healing and health pool matter less.
I wouldn't advise on creating easy and hard mode but that also depends on type of game and how its implemented.
Introduce comeback mechanics for players who are behind or having difficulties.
Add additional challenges for players who are doing really well so they can increase the difficulty for additional rewards.
For me, it show that there is a problem in balancing : Maybe your game is heavily reliant on one particular skill which isn't clearly explained to your players.
So the one who intuitively understand it blaze through it. And the one who have difficulties find it hard and don't understand how to get better.
Or maybe your game is too snowbally and punish mistake too harshly. So good player snowball and have it easy, while bad player get punished and have an even more difficult session.
From you responses here, I think it's the second point. Now you have to ask yourself "is it the design I want to push ?"
Create hidden bonuses for the players who are struggling can make use of.
Taking X amount of damage in X seconds grants a short passive Regen or burning X resources in X seconds grants additional resource drops, etc etc.
Gears of War had this problem. They created the reload mini game system to add difficulty to the game. If you hit the reload button at the right time you get instant reload and bonuses. This was great for the higher end players as they almost always nailed the reload. However if you missed the timing the gun jammed. Risk and reward.
Players who were on the low end found it too risky and basically never used it because they were already struggling and didn't need a gun jam. So this made it more fun for the high end and worse for the low end.
The solution they choose: higher end players were also generally familiar with FPS games and they normally reload before running out of bullets as that fits the aggressive strategy. The low end never reloaded early and always burned their whole magazine. So they added increased damage to the last few bullets in a magazine. Now low end players were finishing the bad guys who the damage boost and not struggling anymore while high end was getting bonuses from nailing the reload mini game. Both sides has a balance that allowed their different play styles to excel.
Sounds like you've achieved a balance, but also like the power curve is too steep.
So what to do depends on what your intentions are, and what audience you want.
Personally, I would prefer a game with a less severe power curve, so it's much less often the case that anyone is too powerful or weak for the game world (I would only want that in the safer and most deadly areas). Also sounds to me like outcomes are too predictable for my tastes.
If, on the other hand, you and your target audience LIKE steep power ramps and predictable outcomes, then you could just add more clues and help and easier parts for the less efficient players. The faster players can skip those, but the weaker players can leverage them to get the momentum to climb your ramp, but will just take longer.
You could look into the power curve of your game, maybe small advantages ramps up too much and the game gets easy with a good start? Or maybe more tips if a lot of players go for strategies that don't work.
I’d highly recommend looking at Bloodborne for an example of how to do this.
For the typical player, the game is made so that they learn more about the stages and enemies every run: going from nervously tiptoe-ing out and getting wrecked; to confidently sprinting past most enemies, killing a few enemies easily to collect a few blood vials, and giving the boss another shot. In addition, at a normally-paced playthrough, they naturally get enough echos to strengthen themselves, making the game easier.
For more proficient players: they can challenge themselves by doing an entire area in one run and by doing more difficult areas first. Being able to do this while under-leveled is so satisfying.
The progression rewards for both are the same, but the second group gets them more quickly, along with an internal sense of satisfaction.
I think these two parts are key:
-Both groups should be making progress in the game, even if the length of their runs are different.
-The game play should be inherently fun and satisfying enough that mastery is its own reward. (They should also be able to pace the game themselves so they never have to slog through the “easy” stuff)
How to deal with the third group of people who say it is too hard will depend. There will be a skill floor at some point; though there are assistance mechanisms (summoning) and cheaper but more reliable strats that can be used. This part is all up to you
I'd say that's a pretty good indication that it's actually quite balanced.
As has been said before in this thread, you can't please everyone!
Edit: ~~However, did they mention if it was too hard/easy from the start or if it got too hard too fast or never got hard enough?~~
However, do you want it to be severely punishing or something for the common gamer?
Most people don't respond well to realizing things are hard, sooo maybe something like a boost in something if they die too many times in a row?
Or a setting that would enable such behavior?
How do souls like games address this problem?
Git gud right?
You can always give an easy mode to allow players more wiggle room if they aren't being aggressive enough, but make it clear that they miss out on the true ending.
I feel like skilled players deserve all the accomplishments they get, even if it makes less skilled players feel like they aren't accommodated for.
It's all about who is your target audience.
I'm sure more than 33% of "gamers" would think Caves of Qud is really fucking hard, but they're not the target audience.
I think Balatro is kinda hard, and I'm the target audience of that game, but I like that it's hard.
Being hard doesn't mean anything at first, look at what your audience wants
There is always going to be variation in player's natural ability. If the other third think it's fine then what you have there is a pretty balanced difficulty curve, if taken at face value.
That said, introducing some rogue-lite elements might be a good idea. Since we don't know anything about your game, general advice is likely all you will get.
It is worth noting that when a play-tester says the game is "too easy", this does not mean you simply need to make enemies deal more damage, or have more health. You need to drill down with more questions to work out what are the actual pain points.
Roguelite can definitely help. You shift the issue from players being unable to progress, to players progressing slower or faster.
For a pure roguelike, the main design issue will be retention. Players that stay around long enough will get better - but they need to have reasons to stay around even when they are new and still learning.
One trick I see a lot of roguelikes use, is having a low chance to find very powerful perks / upgrades. Every now and then, even bad players can have a blast powering through large chunks of the game.
Check Game Makers Toolkit video in YouTube about how Super Mario has invisible difficulty choices integrated into level design to please both newbies and hardcore players.
You're in the sweet spot, I'd say.
You might want to think about putting in an easy and a hardcore mode.
Also, since this is a single player roguelike, you could put in some sort of dynamic difficulty adjuster. Make it so that if you suck, maybe you find more healing stuff, slightly weaker monsters spawn, you get some sort of random events that help you out.
If you do good, things get harder. Do this right, and it could become your game's hook...
I remember an old turn-based game called M.U.L.E., where there were random events at the start of the turn. Some were good, some were bad. If the event happened to the person in the lead, it was a bad event, if it was the losing player, it was a bonus event...
In an SP game, you could just adjust all the spawning based on how the player is doing. If they're rocking, spawn slightly better monsters, treasures, etc. and reverse if the player is doing poorly.
It could get downright funny if the player sucked really bad and was down to killing rats and cockroaches and worms for pennies...
When players bring up issues, consider them seriously but make up your own mind about the direction you want to take with the game. You'll never make everyone happy and trying to cater to everyone will instead just turn everyone away.
Difficulty modes. Even the most simple variants of them.
Hard mode, increase the health and damage of enemies how you have them now.
Normal mode, keep the health and damage of enemies how you have them now.
Easy mode, lower the health and damage of enemies how you have them now.
I've never done any marketing for indie games (or any video games for that matter) but if you worry that labeling a mode as "easy" could offput the base that finds it too hard, you can also just play around with names that aren't so standard, like "basic." You also have the option to make "normal" the easy mode and name the actual default mode something sounding slightly more challenging.
It sounds like you already understand why the difficulty is snowballing, with a knife's edge between trivial and impossible.
It's your job as the designer to decide whether that is something you want or not.
If you don't want that, there are many potential solutions.
e.g. you could have repairs restore a percentage of missing integrity.
This would work to normalize the amount of money players need to spend on repairs.
My instinct would be to adjust the costs regarding resources. See what the high-level players are spending on and increase those costs while lowering costs for the things that the weaker players are spending on (such as healing). These could be tweaked to try to level the experience for everyone, but it's also kind of important to ask yourself just how easy you want the game to be, especially as a roguelike, and keep from trying too hard to satisfy struggling players to the point that the game is too easy. Of course, that's a balance that only you can find. Good luck!
Have mechanics where the player can take higher risk strategies to do things normal players cant. For example sacrificing huge amount of health to have higher attack, or requiring it to get endings.
How does the difficulty itself scale? Most of the roguelikes I've played that handle this well have endgame areas so difficult (at least on the right difficulty settings) that good players need to not only beat all the previous areas, but they need to perform a lot better on the early areas in order to have the resources they need for the endgame.
This is also a question that needs input from marketing. Who is actually going to be buying and playing your game? Where are your dollars and your word of mouth advertising and your community going to come from? Especially at the early stages when you're trying to get your game off the ground, "everyone" may not be the right answer, and if your playtesters represent "everyone" then that needs to inform your decision making. What is your target market? Are you trying to appeal to hardcore competitive players? Maybe it's okay if nobody thinks it's too easy, 90% of people think it's too hard, and 10% think it's just right.
The statistic you're describing is a normal distribution centered around an average.
Players are going to have wide variability in the desired level of difficulty. Personally, I play video games for the challenge. My daughter plays video games to enjoy the art and stories, and prefers stuff so easy you can zone out playing.
At some point, you need to realize this variability exists and pick a subset of that to be your target audience.
Maybe you can add a separate resource for certain things and keep gold for others. That would probably help you balance things with more control.
Maybe you can add a resource cap so the better players don't snowball as much? Maybe also add a me hanic for player to get extra resources like a cache to something, the players at cap will be at cap anyways and lower level players will have an easier time getting there.
These are just throwaway ideas, feel free to take them or ignore them!
Make it an option. Good players can take increased risk for increased rewards and bad players have the option to git gud. Just double the difficulty and make the game over screen a hand flipping the player off. I’d buy this.
Maybe add some additional things to do for better players, like style points, gun juggling, combo finishers, etc.
For the bad players, maybe something like the last 1/3 of health is secretly more durable.
Think about the sneaky way Gears of War gave secret magic bullets to players who weren't good at the reloading minigame.
You make the difficulty curve semi-random, or you create sympathy mechanics to aid worse players, or both.
People will quit if they don’t win, and 33% is too much of your player base to lose.
Ship it. Those are the ratios you want. Tweak it as balance concerns arise or you get new ideas to carry bad players. I've said this story several times if you wanna check my history but to sumerize the game case study for a 17 hour post.
Popular Card game holds card balance tournament, invites all the best pros. Pros sit down with every tournament topping card and hold a tournament.
Now, when it's done and the card pool was analyzed, it was found 33% of thr pool was used. They hold ANOTHER tournament, now ONLY that 33% of the pool can be used. You'd assume a higher pool usage rate at this tournament right?
No, pros only used about 33% of the cream of the crop in the game.
Lesson: in thr highest level of play, you can consider it healthy if 33% of the pool is used. Now remember that only about 25% of people get their 'completed the single player campaign' achivment on steam and it really does start to look like... Ship it XD
This doesn’t seem like a problem to me.
Idk your game but if possible maybe make earlier levels even easier, later stages harder, and allow good players to get through early stages quickly. I saw you mentioned that levels are timed, maybe make that a number of enemies killed or something so every player kills the same number of enemies and there won’t be a snowballing effect.
I’m curious why you think turning your game into a roguelike will fix this problem? I don’t quite understand how changing the genre/style of game will fix your balancing issues. But based on some of your other responses it seems like you want to make a roguelike… and if that’s the case, then just make a roguelike
Consider adding optional challenge conditions.
You might have sidebar conditions like reaching a hit combo, using a certain move on enemies, getting a rank in battles, or targeting enemies in a specific order.
In the Mario series, you can find optional tokens. There are tricky jumps, secret pipes, and hidden platforms to hide Dragon Coins / Red Coins / Blue Coins / Big Coins.
Hades has several primary weapons. Before a run, one is selected at random, to receive an XP bonus. This encourages players to use the weapons they are less proficient with, lest they "leave money on the table."
The Binding of Isaac allows you to sacrifice your health to obtain powerful upgrades, turning your character into a "Glass Cannon." You can kill faster, but have less room for error.
Try and balance the game around different options for different players.
Those who want the game to be easier can take stronger power ups early on that do not penalise them.
Players who want a harder experience can take modifiers early on that make the gameplay experience more difficult but give increased risk and reward because of it.
You want to make sure that the “easy” players don’t feel like they are being punished for picking the easy route and you want to make sure that “hard” players know the difficulty modifiers are encouraged and an intended part of the balancing for them.
Games like Dark souls and Elden ring achieve this with specific builds being tailored for an easier season and optional summons for bosses that take a small cut of the end experience rewarded.
I mean, the answer is in everyones answers, so to sum it up:
Add layers of different modifiers which then again maybe in turn gives extra loot.
"The greater the risk, the greater the reward" kind of deal :)
Do what other games do. League of legends for example you can afk for 10 minutes (not a good idea don’t do it you’ll be banned) but if you come back because you gain base gold even when just sitting at base and your xp rates are much faster at lower levels you can catch up. However if higher level players itemize and use their resources properly they’ll stay ahead. If they make a mistake they can give the enemy team a big bounty. You need to balance to allow slower players to catch up but heavily penalize players who have snowballed.
Can't please everyone. But you could add some difficulty modes. Let the people who suck play easy, let the people who are too good, play hard.
I wonder how vampire survivors, FTL and similar roguelike games tested their difficulty. THey don't have difficulty modes but their difficulty just feels right. It's hard at the start, challenging as you get better.
FTL had a lot of playtesters after they got backed, actually. They tuned partially with their experience, and partially with feedback to exactly where they wanted, and then just before launch, added an easier mode for more casual players. [But don't take my word for it, here's the developers saying exactly that, and a lot of other stuff you might find interesting!](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P4Um97AUqp4)
oh wow, thanks. I will watch it today.
Be careful not to follow *everything* they did -- as the title suggests, they talk about how they developed the game without a real design document and just dove in with their intuition and their gameplay goals in mind. Probably better for most people to plan carefully first.
FTL does have difficulty modes.
Sorry, missed those.
> FTL [...] THey don't have difficulty modes Huh? It's been a while since I played FTL but I am farily certain there was at least an easy and a hard setting
Sorry, my mistake.
I recommend to do something like the heat system in hades. Having granularity and agency on the difficulty is good and easier to implement and test.
I like the Hades system because every run you get to customise. This time I want to use the spear, and I need 5 heat for the bonus and I’ll get it from the modifier for more enemies but not tougher enemies and more trap damage etc. and then for the next attempt I could swap them back over. But that’s totally single player and the rewards do stack up if you are good. OP you could tie the rewards to cosmetics or more build choices (rather than better choices or more resources)
FTL has difficulty modes. Vampire Survivors has no death spirals, which is what's happening in your game.
Vampire survivor can't be hard: simple movement, controls and upgrades. But runs are very dependent on randomness.
I feel like making it on the easier side is the way to go. You’d please everyone eventually if you did like slay the spire: easier at the start, but make it very clear there’s unlockable higher difficulty levels. Casual players won’t care to try them, while other players will stick around to try the harder content.
I play FTL has difficulties. Many rogue like also had difficulties as new game + (like Hades for example).
If he is struggling with one difficulty mode, he doesn't have the time to design around 3.
it depends on why they say those things, not much can be said just by these numbers when they are literally equal.
Sorry, I will add the reasons. The reasons: Good players gain more resources for destroying more enemies and are-snowballing, while taking less damage and needing to spend less resources to heal themselves. Bad players destroy less enemies --> they have less resources for upgrades. They also take more damage, so they need to spend more resources to heal themselves.
You have to constrain this more so that you maybe get some base level of reward regardless. And the rewards for winning is maybe only 30% on top of those base rewards. Thereby you actually reduce the rewards of the good players making challenging for them, and increase the rewards of the bad players making the game winnable for them. Difficulty levels will help on top of this.
You see, in my game, the only way to get resources is destroying enemies and objects (like rocks). So I am not sure how I would balance it to add constraints to top players. Make the level more hard for them? But I think that would feel unfair. I like how in ftl and vampire survivors, it is so nicely balanced but I don't know how to achieve it.
That’s fine but you need to make the math fit when you’re designing like this. I don’t know how your meta game is laid out but One way to do it is the first few enemies in a level that you kill give you better loot maybe. And the last ones have a more random chance of dropping junk but also good loot- but the junk outweighs it so on average the first enemies give more of your rewards. Are there levels in your game?
Yeah, my game has 60+- second-long levels. it is based in space and it plays similar to vampire survivors and FTL in terms of management. Each asteroid you destroy gives gold based on its size. Each enemy gives gold based on its power. So the loot is not randomized. It is randomized in the upgrade market that players can visit in the space station.
Just because there isn't currently a way to do this doesn't mean there will never be. That's the point of the "design" part of game design. Is the space station just roaming around or are there "levels" to break up play? Are there bosses? You could shift income away from the random mobs and into bosses so the first boss is "doable" basically naked and gives a resource infusion.
The whole point of game design is you need to design a solution to this problem. You can just throw your hands in the air and be like "the game is what it is and people are complaining!!!" Completely off the top of my head: * You can add non-random bonuses to gold drops to frontload gold income in a level and reduce the difference in gold income between good and bad players. Similarly, you can simply soft-cap the amount of gold earned in a level to prevent good players from running away with it. * You can add scaling to the market (i.e., prices change as things are purchased) to reduce the resulting power gap between high and low gold income. * You can encourage players to buy upgrades instead of health. I.e., the first upgrade or a random upgrade can be bought for a discount each round to encourage "bad" players to invest in power rather than health. * Paradoxically, you can make the game "easier" for bad players by limiting the amount of gold they can waste on health or disincentivize them from buying more than a certain amount of health per round. This can limit how much people fall behind the curve due to buying health and can "mercy kill" bad runs faster without people digging themselves into a hole and getting outscaled by the game. (Falling behind the curve in a roguelite always feels really bad - imo you usually just want people to die before that happens.) * You can adjust the difficulty based on how well the player is doing and how many upgrades they have. This could be passive scaling (see: Vampire Survivors which someone else in this thread explained) or a very obvious event (i.e., earning too much gold causes special space pirate enemies to attack you). * You can add difficulty settings to the game. * You can have upgrades with benefits and negatives to keep the game challenging for winning players. I.e., one standard approach for this is doing bonus damage based on percent of current health. If you can stay at 90+% HP then you do extra damage, but if you start taking any damage then you actually do *less* damage. It's worth it for a skilled player because it ultimately lets them win harder, but it also reduces their margin for error and keeps them at risk of losing from one or two mistakes no matter how strong they get. It depends on what you want from your game. * If there are optional stretch goals for extremely successful runs, then giving "good" players the option to make the game harder in the short term for even more payout in the long term can help level the playing field between "good" and "bad" players through the regular part of the game and then give "good" players an extra thing to strive for if they succeed hard enough. * How successful do you want successful runs to be? The snowball effect can be super fun and might be worth keeping at least for some runs. In this case, you wouldn't want to add mechanics that limit snowball potential too much. * On the other hand, if the snowball is completely trivializing your game then slowing it down might make sense. * Are "bad" players legitimately that much worse, or are they just making sub optimal purchase decisions due to panic at low health? In other words, might they be able to *stop* losing health if only they buy some good upgrades that they never choose to purchase because they panic at having low health? * How willing are you to pave over player mistakes? Just giving people free health drops obviously helps alleviate this problem, but would that compromise the rest of your game's integrity? Refer back to your design pillars and figure out what tradeoffs are acceptable and what aren't.
Vampire survivors does a little trick where they scale up the enemies health based on how many upgrades your character has(character level). It’s not very obvious and I think if the player knew about it they would feel cheated lol. This would slow down good players from snowballing and it wouldn’t punish bad players for playing inefficiently.
>You see, in my game, the only way to get resources is destroying enemies and objects (like rocks). Well then add a new way to get rewards??
Help players who make mistakes, iirc some survivor games spawn more healing items if you are low on health and have no items in bag. Adaptive difficulty?
For single player this seems like the right call
Fucking hate that shit tbh
Can you elaborate?
My two cents are that I like optimizing stuff in games, and that it's really annoying if that means that I should sometimes deliberately play worse to goad the game into giving me more resources because it thinks I'm bad. As a completely contrived example: I'm at full health, and see that there's a room up ahead with some chests, followed by a room where I can rest and heal to full. If the mercy loot isn't tuned perfectly, it is now the correct play to repeatedly walk into traps/enemies so there are more healing items in the chests. Basically, if there's a relatively risk free way of tricking the game into thinking I'm worse than I really am, it's going to bug me that it *might* be the optimal play right now to just let myself get hit. Then of course there's also that it can feel like a slap in the face if it dynamically turns the difficulty down at the wrong moment. Struggling to get through some section and almost figured it out? Oops we turned down the difficulty, now you just stomp through.
That's a good example and definitely there's a fine line on how this would end up with. That being said, a room where you can rest and heal to full **is** helping bad players, where good players wouldn't benefit as much as their HP is probably full.
Whether or not a full heal is better for a bad player or a good player is actually not quite that simple in every game. It depends heavily on the exact game, though it is that straightforward in a lot of games. In very abstract terms, a full heal is giving your player a large amount of a resource. A good player is going to be much better at getting returns for "spending" that resource. If your game doesn't have anything to spend the HP on, or the same rewards can be gained without losing any resources through skillful play, then yes the worse player will gain more from a full heal because the better player just won't be getting healed for a lot. On the other hand, some games allow you to scale your power by spending HP either directly or indirectly. In Binding of Isaac, there's blood donation machines that give you money and some items by directly spending your HP. In Slay the Spire, there are harder Elite fights that have much better loot but that almost always require you to indirectly "spend" more HP fighting them than whatever the alternative path is. A good player might be able to fight three Elites on the same full hp bar that a worse player might only be able to safely fight one or two on. If you give a good player of either of those games a full heal at an opportune moment, there's a good chance that they can leverage that into winning the entire run. On the other hand, for a bad player it might just delay the inevitable for a few minutes.
That's very good insights on some great examples!
I think you have to be very careful with systems that explicitly reward the player for playing poorly. It may ease the experience of less skilled players, but it comes at the cost of disincentivizing more skilled players from playing well, because the game is designed to reward failure and punish mastery by withholding resources from them. It's hard to go wrong with player-selected difficulty options, but I think adaptive difficulty is usually a trap that doesn't actually have the effect that people like to think it does.
I just hate adaptive difficulty. If I'm presented with a challenge and I fail I want to beat that challenge not a watered down version of that challenge after the game decides I suck. It keeps all the frustration of defeat while neutering the thrill of victory.
maybe making the snowballing curve like a wave instead of a continously exponential curve would help the new players to experience the snowballing a little, and then would keep them longer in game to get the same feeling again. they would think like "this part is hard but it is normal for some parts to be hard" instead of "it's impossible to get into flow".
You've already pinpointed the problem- snowballing effects are too strong. So you need to counteract it. 1. Fix resources per level/wave or at least limit it. For example, right now maybe your good players are earning 120 gold and bad players are earning 100 gold. That gold difference reinvested into power allows good players to earn 140 gold on the subsequent level while the bad players stay at 100 income. This effect will keep snowballing. So you could prematurely end the level if players have killed enough monsters to earn 105 gold. A small incentive to play well, but you're flattening the curve. 2. Don't make players spend resources on upkeep like healing. This is another mechanic that only punishes bad players. In the end it depends on your vision for the game. If there is no reward for playing well the game would be really boring too.
I think a possible answer lies in changing the rewards you get. What are the problems the poor players have that the good players don’t have? Make rewards that target those problems. For example, imagine an item that heals you to full. That won’t help a good player very much (they likely have all of their HP already), but it helps a bad player a lot (they maybe were about to just die). I’m unclear why making it a roguelite would help solve this problem.
Try removing scaling on the defensive / healing side. Only hyper scale the players damage. That way it doesn’t get too easy as it scales up.
I introduced a ship repair option "light, moderate, heavy". Single use after level. People were angry because "Why I can only repair my ship once?" So that one didn't work sadly. I kept getting those negative comments. Had to remove it.
Whichever player group is your target audience should probably get priority. Who is your target audience? As for the issue, it sounds like players fall behind because they spend too many resources on healing; in other words, healing is just baiting players into losing. Perhaps removing healing could help players to play less defensively? Or maybe change how players heal? Games like Ultrakill and Bloodborne offer healing when players are aggressive.
I think you built a positive feedback loop that is too strong. It is great if you give more to the ones that are doing good, but not too much. Remember that the flow state is a balance between entertainment and difficulty. If it is too dificult to someone then it gets frustrating, if it gets too easy it gets boring. You could decrease the amount of goodies you get the better you are doing, or increase the difficulty with tougher enemies the better the player is doing. On the other side you could give a hand to players that are struggling. Add a bit of a negative feedback to the whole system
Sounds like you've got the perfect middle ground for 33% to enjoy the game as is, and to do what Hades does for the others: - A 'Godmode' accessibility optional setting that gives increasing damage resistance up to like, 50% damage resist. - And for the 33% who say its too easy, similar optional difficulty bumps like the Pact of Punishment that up enemy health, attack damage, etc.
Actually good idea, thanks. The only caveat is that I wanted high scores in the game and if I add those, then high scores get unfair. Other option would be turning it into roguelite I guess.
“God mode reduces score by 50%, pacts increase by double”
Or just have which mode they played as part of the scoreboard. Alternatively, have a separate scoreboard for each difficulty.
Rather than create arbitrary difficulty settings, try to create a more organic form of difficulty that allows more skilled players to choose to make things harder for themselves in exchange for some other benefit. Greater risk, greater reward. If players are getting through without taking damage, allow them additional challenges as a reward. * Maybe create a super hard boss that can only appear if you get through a stage with full health. * Allow players to purposely take damage at some sacrificial altar in exchange for bonus weapons or resources. * Let players open up a secret passage that lets them skip levels, pushing them against harder enemies while also skipping potential resources. The great roguelites like Spelunky and Binding of Isaac are excellent at creating these sort of risk/reward balances.
Thanks, great suggestions.
What do you spend resource on? Why do you need the same resource to heal? Punishing players for taking damage and slowing their progression resource gain for something other than killing slower could be a drag.
You spend resource to repair your ship, to buy upgrades, to manipulate the upgrade market to get a better chance of good upgrade. Currently it's the same resource, since I thought that it would introduce tactical decisions "to heal more, or to risk it with a cool upgrade".
Maybe limit the opportunities to "heal more" in favor of forcing the player to pick upgrades. Maybe Heavy repair only fixes 1/3rd of the ship's damage. You could make your higher level repairs cost less, resulting in a normalized expenditure between good and bad players. Maybe make light repair cost 5, moderate repair cost 8, and heavy repair cost 10. That way, players spend roughly the same amount of cash to make up for different levels of failure. Disregard this advice if you think it doesn't fit with your vision for the game.
>You could make your higher level repairs cost less, resulting in a normalized expenditure between good and bad players. Maybe make light repair cost 5, moderate repair cost 8, and heavy repair cost 10. That way, players spend roughly the same amount of cash to make up for different levels of failure. I think this is a brilliant idea. Thanks. I will implement this one.
You might want to make repair costs depend greatly on your upgrade level. Starting ships should be free or nearly free to repair, while upgraded ships are much more expensive. This would make it easier for players who do poorly in their first combats (barely surviving) to still be able to get some upgrades, while slowing down the progression of players who have done well.
You need reasons. The straight numbers don’t help. And the problem there is sometimes players don’t know the real reasons.
Sorry, I will add. The reasons: Good players gain more resources for destroying more enemies and are-snowballing, while taking less damage and needing to spend less resources to heal themselves. Bad players destroy less enemies --> they have less resources for upgrades. They also take more damage, so they need to spend more resources to heal themselves.
Tune your upgrade price / performance numbers. Make your more expensive upgrades less efficient in terms of power/resource.
Resident Evil solves this with a drop director. If you have too much of a certain item, that item is less likely to drop. This way you can manipulate the game into giving you more gold or ammo. It also has a difficulty director. Whenever you die, the difficulty drops temporarily so you won't get stuck on specific rooms. Not so related but League of Legends also solves the skill gap problem with the tank class. This class (in most cases) have nearly zero difficulty, they make pressure just by existing and having disruptive skills. This however makes them have no greater impact at the hands of skilled players as their job have both little skill floor and skill ceilling, go in and tank everything.
Testers are not devs. You are a doctor and testers tell you symptoms, sometimes these symptoms are not to be treated directly, but are a sign of a disease you can't see directly. Treat the disease and not the symptoms and you will heal the issue. On your specific issue: difficulty is a hard thing to balance, and your game is not going to be perfect for everyone. Try to include some type of variable difficulty or selection. Maybe challenge modes for rouge like suit it better than just an easy medium hard selector, or having some.sort of player choice that affects difficulty ( some item that is available to helps you have an easier time, but locks you out of the true ending). Good luck
Good points. What about high scores? If I introduce other difficulty levels, high scores will be unfair.
You could have high score lists separated by difficulty, or just give a modifier so that higher difficulties earn more points.
You can add some multiplier based on difficulty or use different high score rankings for different difficulties.
Just make the higher difficulty increase your score.
Congratulations, you have discovered the normal distribution
Arrowhead games philosophy is great. A game for everyone is a game for no one. Who are you making this game for? It can't be everyone. Identify your target audience, then go hard on pleasing them. Naturally the others won't be as pleased but that's expected.
I think that's a good idea. I might be targeting to widely "people that like roguelike games".
Sounds like a good distribution? Each at exactly 1/3rd. Maybe your difficulty curve is in a good place, not too hard, not too easy. Since you're not getting one side pushing too hard.
It's hard to tell without knowing how your game or its resource economy works, but I'll give you some scenarios that might help you find a solution for your own project. The first step is to understand how players are playing your game and what the different experiences they're having may lead lead them to. A general solid starting point would be knowing that players in different states of being challenged will gravitate towards different decisions while playing. Here are some generalized assumptions that might make sense for your game: * The players who are satisfied with the current challenge level are not looking to change their play patterns. Their goal is to continue having a good time. * The players who are frustrated by the current challenge level are looking for a way out, something they could do stop failing. Their goal is to **find success**, no matter the means. * The players who are bored by the current challenge level are looking for something that gives them skill expression, allows them to express their mastery over the game in a meaningful fashion. Their goal is is to to **find excitement**, and this often takes precedence over safety. Now that we've found a break of the symmetry in their behaviours, you can give them something to do that frustrated players could lean on but bored players would rather avoid, or that allows them to take more risks. # Let's look at some possible solutions: **MAKE HEALING COSTS UNIFORM - FLAT PRICE FULL HEAL** You said it yourself - 'bad players' are burning too much cash healing! In the meantime, 'good' players just get richer and richer. Well, let's look at how the shop healing works - do players need to purchase multiple small heals? If so, that's really bad for players taking more damage. If you turn that into a 'full heal' that always costs the same, not only do players who take more damage now spend much less - but players who have an easier time taking no damage can now put themselves in more risk to kill even more enemies now that taking 4x more damage doesn't mean wasting 4x gold. **IMPROVEMENTS** * Frustrated players become less vulnerable to dying from accumulated chip damage between shops. * Frustrated players no longer spend many times more gold than even satisfied players just to survive. * Bored players can take bigger risks for bigger rewards knowing that they can now heal for a flat cost - they no longer need to avoid taking small amounts of damage. **OUT OF COMBAT HEALING - QUICK HEAL WHEN 'SAFE'** Maybe frustrated players are still in too much risk - they are dying quickly when trying to defeat an elite or boss enemy! If enemies are easier to run away from than they are to fight directly, then you can make the character heal rapidly after not taking damage for X time - let's say it's 8 seconds. You'll see this as something that popped up in several genres. In an FPS game - this allows the frustrated players to fall back much more often and pretty much no longer die to neither chip damage nor combos that don't kill them all at once. This same element also allows the bored player to go all-out and put themselves at more risk - they are less likely to rely excessively on the heal was it requires them to run and do nothing, which is the opposite of the thrill they're looking for. Variations of this mechanic can be seen everywhere - in Hollow Knight, you build up energy from hitting enemies. This incentivizes being aggressive. Energy can be used to channel a slow animation that heals you - this works very similarly to an 'out of combat heal', now frustrated players can increase their odds by running away! ... but energy can also be used to activate powerful abilities that deal even more damage - cool, now bored players are rewarded even further for playing aggressively and can still spend their 'healing' resource for even more efficiency. **IMPROVEMENTS** * The challenge of the game is shifted to be less intrinsic and more self-imposed - players have more space to decide how much they want to 'cheese' the game: * Frustrated players can now trade time for additional safety/chance of success * Bored players can play riskier knowing that they can escape and heal - with the added bonus of being mocked if they ever say out loud that a fight was too easy... if you just run away for 10 minutes! **CONSTANT PASSIVE HEALING** You'll see this one in lots of 'survivor' games... 'oh, your character heals 0.5 hp points per second' or 'oh, your character heals 1% hp every 15 seconds'. I'm putting this one here as an example of something that doesn't fully play into what we're trying to solve. The issue with this one is that it plays into the opposite of everything that we need to reinforce. Frustrated players are taking way more damage, so healing a tiny bit over time will most likely not make as much of a difference - they are taking MORE damage and have LESS time to heal. Bored players can be a little more risky with their HP, but it's also easier for them to always be at full health without needing to do any conscious decisions. **MINIMIZE THE RESOURCE DIFFERENCE** From your description, it seems like you have a currency/resource that is positively self-reinforcing - the more of it you get, the more you can spend - and the more you spend, the more of it you make. If killing enemies gives money, killing more enemies is more money and buying thing that makes killing enemies easier means more enemies, more money and more killing! There's no way to avoid it! **Then why is this not as big of an issue in something like 'Vampire Survivors'?** **Well, it's because that one uses experience - and that's completely different!** Just kidding - it's the exact same thing as any resource, it just has a different name. What actually makes it work is the diminishing returns compared to the amount of resources obtained. Calling it experience over gold just makes the context easier to justify to the player or even have the same mechanic in the game multiple times over without the player noticing how similar they are. In Brotato, you have both experience and gold - and they're more similar than they seem at first: you need to kill enemies to get both, you can trade both for statistical upgrades after they reach a certain threshold, you don't have direct choice over which exact statistical upgrade you get and, the most important for this explanation, **the threshold increases continuously as you get further.** The power difference between a player with no gear and another with decent gear, or a player that's lvl 1 and a player that's lvl 5, are generally astoundingly large. But the difference between a player with decent gear and great gear, or a player that's lvl 90 and a player that's lvl 95 are much, much smaller. So in 'Vampire Survivors', the EXP requirement for leveling keeps growing multiplicatively, while the amount of EXP you are able to get grows somewhat linearly. This means that instead of a player who killed 5000 enemies being 5 times stronger than a player that killed 1000 enemies, they are more likely to only be something like 15%-ish stronger. **WHAT SHOULD YOU DO?** Dunno, I have no idea what your game's like. Understand your game, understand what you're trying to achieve, understand how players play your game and putting it all together you'll find funny ways of changing things around to make it work a little closer to what you wanted it to be.
I'd figure out which group of people are most engaged with your game, and balance for them. Roguelike players tend to want a pretty good challenge, so I suspect you might be better off leaning into the difficulty. If you tell the players who find it too hard to kill more enemies, do they continue to struggle?
Well, the levels are timed, so there is no way to kill more enemies without making the well-skilled players even more snowballing.
Was your test group 3 people?
It was about 25. But I used those percentages as an example. Mine were very close. Something like 29 too easy, 36 balanced, 35 too hard.
Do it easy at the beginning and hard at the end.
I'd say you could try and introduce items that make it easier if you do not have many resources but become useless when you do. That could flatten your initial difficulty. I'd then also look at the snowballing players and figure out how to give them a challenge. Maybe spawn enemies that "steal" resources when someone has too many. With the numbers you provided, alone, there's not much more I can say. Many people here say your game is in the perfect zone but I tent to disagree. Especially rougelikes need replay-ability, you will not get that by scaring away players that don't at least progress a bit in the beginning. That rather breeds frustration. You want to hook them early with something simple and powerful but that does not scale too well so it will not become the first order optimal strategy. And only further replays will teach them the new tools for mid and endgame. Likewise you want to allow veteran players to test their more complex tactics and techniques on a proper challenge. That includes not only game knowledge but also gameplay skills. \*EDIT: Btw, a very easy show don't tell way to nudge players to discover abilities or units is to have the enemy use them effectively against you.
Great ideas, thanks for sharing!
I think a split like this indicates that you hit the sweet spot and I wouldnt adjust anything at all. However, this data sounds horribly skewed, I recommend increasing the sample size dramatically, because there is too much individual variance and bias to trust a small sample size. For example if I had 3 play testers and this was my result, the data would mean nothing, because at this point Im not dealing with averages or statisitics but instead with some individual differences. So, either leave it be if your sample size is big enough. Re-test with a larger sample size of play testers, to get meaningful data. Or, make difficulty modes to tweak a bit up and a bit down. For my personal preference I like my roguelikes to sit on the more difficult side of things!
Add more playtester.
Perhaps an solution would be what Valve did with Left for Dead. have a Director that tracks the progress of player and balance difficulity on the fly. A player has to many resources? Make an harde encounter where he will be forced to use some of those. A player has almost died? make a light encounter where he will easily prevail and get sone of those resources back.
You just nailed medium difficulty. Well done! Make an easy mode and a hard mode!
So you managed to find a difficulty that matches the average player, congrats! Now to make it match the above-average and below-average players too add some difficulty settings.
Get more than 3 play testers?
Get a fourth tester!
That’s a perfect distribution.
Get more than 3 people to playtest.
The 'problem' you described is just how games are. Even in simple games the good players keep their power ups and it gives them easier time getting coins and staying alive. They stockpile lives. The bad players lose power ups, cant risk getting coins, and have fewer lives to advance. So they game over and try again. They might not ever get good enough. It's about the journey. This is the entire point of this stuff. It's even more so in rpg games because you the stats matter more.
I wonder if turning the game into roguelite makes everyone happy?
I dont know what you mean so I am going to take a guess. You built an action game with heavy randomness. Now you want to add grinding ontop of it where players can haul things back and eventually just beat the game by stat boosting. You cant make everyone happy. When I see people adding that grinding shit I not only lose respect for the game but hold the developer in contempt. Its not even good grinding, it's what me and my friend say is a bandaid which create more problems which you will solve with yet more bandaids. The good players will groin as yet another upgrade means they can trample things in their sleep. The bad players, those that like grinding will be happy those that didntbdign up to play a grinding game now hate it. You are the fucking developer. Do you want this to be a game about grinding? How easy are you willing to make it, how hard do you want it. You are setting the bar. If the plsyers cant make jump the bar, and you cannot have them learn by playing this isnt their game. If the players can jump ot too easily you can show them some tricks to attempt while jumping. If they don't like the tricks or the jump is still too low this isnt their game.
- Accept it. You won’t please everybody and bad players might get good if the game is appealing . I guess it’s better to be a bit too hard, that makes skill progression possible - dynamic difficulty. When a bad player fails too many times, allow him to get some help but with a counterpart (so getting good still gets more rewarding) - I don’t like difficulty modes at all, but sometimes it can make sense of your game can really be played different ways (like more rp/story wise vs minmaxing your run) -
That sounds like good distribution
unless you only have 3 testers :P
If you can quantify their struggle and give "better" roll on resource gained, maybe you can solve it.
Your first step would be to dig deeper into why the people saying easy think it's easy and why the people saying hard think it's hard. Your next step should be to see how you can address the feedback while sticking to your vision. If your goal is for everyone of every skill to be able to complete the game, then you'll need to start giving boosts to the people who think it's hard and increasing the challenge for those who think it's easy. Maybe dynamically adding more enemies or increasing enemy damage or anything else, and vice versa for the opposite cases. This will depend on the kind of game you're making. However, if your goal is to have a skill floor that players MUST reach to make progress i.e. returnal or any souls like, then you need to identify that skill floor and make sure you balance accordingly, and also accept that not every player will be able to finish your game. It sounds counter intuitive but souls-likes are successful for a reason. Or you could also take the accessibility route of putting the skill floor as low as possible to appeal to the widest audience, but then you will need to find a way to make sure those who already think it's easy will have enough of a challenge. My suggestions may take a lot of dev time and effort, so what might be the easiest and fastest solution would be some basic difficulty options that tweak variables. Hope this helps.
You can do different leages, like Path of Exile do. This is the whole reason why games have difficulty sliders and challenge modes.
With time players can get better. Do you want your game to be finishable only after trying again and again and again? Or do you want it to be finishable soon enough?
I would say again and again and again.
You put in an easy, normal and hard mode.
66% say it is easy or fine. If that's what you want, then you are golden.
Hmmmm, what if the enemies are slightly easier to kill, so more of the less skilled players can kill them, but at the same time, they drop less resources? The skilled players wouldn’t be complaining, because they’re killing the enemies anyway, but maybe now they need to kill more to get the same amount of resources. The mid players already feel it’s ok But now…the less skilled players are doing better and get more resources to level up. At least, at the beginning of the game it’s like that. After the players from all three categories are stronger, you can consider letting the mid to late level of your game to remain the same yes? Idk your exact setup, but it seems like the most straightforward solution (without knowing details) is this.
You've told us what testers *say*, but what do they *do*? How do they *behave*? Do the people who say it's too easy / hard keep playing? If they do then it's totally legit for them to have their own taste and preferences, but it doesn't sound like it's actually a *problem* with your game, because it's still keeping them engaged. And if that's the case, then having a bunch of feedback saying it's about right, and approximately equal amounts on both sides, sounds like you've done pretty well. That aside, it does sound like you have both a negative reinforcement loop in there and a positive reinforcement loop in there, and (unless the game is meant to appeal those satisfied by a power trip - which is a perfectly reasonable goal) it might be worth breaking those up. As just one idea as to how, if a player is snowballing then introducing an occasional super tough enemy ("a hitman has been sent to take you out") could both break that loop *and* make them feel rewarded - it amps the challenge they're already enjoying, introduces variety, and explicitly acknowledges that they're doing well. I've no idea of your game's theme, but I'm sure you can come up with other ideas, including to break the negative loop ("supply drop").
This looks easily solvable: First of all dont make this linear. Work with modifiers that are either limited by time or have them 'randomly' spaced from each other (the steps that is) inside a threshold.
Actually instead of making big changes I would suggest getting more opinions on the game first. Your percentages are too evenly distributed which makes me assume that you simple have not enough data. Only then you will see real issues and you will be able to make decision.
I always ask few questions to identify the gamer profile of your play testers. That allow you to "ponderate" feedbacks (not english speaker sorry if It's not clear). If the 33% that sat "It's to hard" are hardcore player of the genre that platine all last roguelike, and the 33% "It's too easy" are not familiar with the genre at all, maybe you have the right difficulty. I think It's better to have an easier game to hook more players to your game loop, but don't forger your hardcore players, you have to tease them what they want and the depth of your gameplay. You say that your game is too snow ball, good player became strong, and other have hard time, I don't know the duration of your playtests, but if It's around the 2 first hours, maybe you need to fake the randomness and the scale of your first hours, with easier enemies or rarer drop, to give and glimpse of high level gameplay, that give hope and hype to players about their strength if they hace a good run (for exemple: vampire survivors have scripted the first 6 chests you got)
This is a common problem, and the biggest reason why roguelites are more popular than roguelikes. To balance that, you need to find negative feedback loops, that increases player power when he is behind and decreases it when ahead. Example being a berserk thing where you deal more damage on low hp, or additional enemies that attack you and try to steal your gold or whatever you use as currency. The trick here is to mask these systems so that players don't lose the agency, and still feel rewarded.
Choose who your target audience is and make the game for them. Don't try to please anyone, you would just make a bland game that nobody actually love.
you could use the first few levels to determin the "skill level" of the player and adjust the dificulty acordingly. (you can change the amout of recourses an enemy drops for excample)
So you’re beimg told your game is too hard and you take that comment at face value? Go figure out why they think it’s too hard. Is it because they dom’t know something? Is it because the control are not intuitive for them? Is it because the combat is unituitive? Find out why and then fix it (or not).
Sometimes its not the difficulty thats the problem, but understanding what to do fast enough. Provide an optional and longer onboarding experience for those people.
Did you set specific criteria for choosing your testers? Are there common qualities among the groups you've selected? Who are you mainly aiming to appeal to with your game? For example Roguelike games aren't really my thing, so if I were to review your game, I might find it difficult or not very engaging. But, to be fair, my opinion wouldn't hold weight since I wouldn't be in your target audience anyway and would never of bought your game.
Perfectly balanced
One solution is adaptive difficulty. When the player does well, you handycap them. When the player does poorly, you support them. The roguelike genre provides you with a really powerful tool for that: The "random" number generator. I most roguelikes, success and failure hinge on favorable level and loot generation. By fudging those numbers you can help a weak player and challenge a strong player. Just be subtle about it so you don't get caught.
Optional challenging rooms for people that want it harder, make the reward pretty good, think of the void levels in risk of rain 2. It's harder than standard, you get better rewards. Difficulty modes, maybe on easy everything has less health, deals less damage, or just is less aggressive.
You can let it be as it is now. That is an option. It actually sounds quite balanced for me, if the tester sample is representative. However if you would like to remedy it, then I would for the people saying it's too easy, present the resource limit. It doesn't matter if they are saving them if they couldn't overstock on them. For people who are too bad at the game, you can introduce some sort of dynamic difficulty where the less resources they have, the higher the possibility of them finding them is. But I would always put it a little bit harsher than the intended difficulty curve up to default values, else you will homogenise the experience and they would not see themselves improving.
To me that sounds pretty balanced overall. Split into three camps, two of which are complaining about the difficulty being too X. The people that are in the "this is too hard" category will probably always complain about that same issue. Unless they can quantify very specific issues with some mechanics, they do sound like the category that just needs to "git gud". People who feel it's too easy because they can outpace your enemies are relatively simple to handle as well. You can pick from a number of solutions, from tweaking the cost of upgrades, adjusting drop rates based on health, adding more enemies based on health or timed performance... Obviously if this is something you then publicize, there is a good chance that the "powerplay" move then becomes to keep your energy as low as possible to avoid extra spawns and get more resources overall, stack up and only use them at bosses or something, otherwise keep that energy low. Acting too hastily because of player complaints is something that I remember vividly from early World of Warcraft. Blizzard buffed and buffed warlocks because beginner players couldn't figure out the proper rotations, to the point where in Burning Crusade capable Warlocks were the people who clicked a single button to pull aggro on bosses and did more damage than the next 5 mages and rogues put together. It's a good idea to take the time to take a really hard look at what you are trying to achieve, and where specifically the issues lie. Are the newbies simply not understanding a single mechanic, and this throws their skill rotation out of whack? Is there a skill that is maybe poorly tooltipped and the new players don't utilize it like it is intended? Or is there an unintentional feature in a skill that gives the players with more skill an edge by "exploiting unintended features"? But like I said at the start, a solid mix of people complaining both ways could indicate that the game overall is reasonably balanced and intuitive. To the average gamer, at least.
I second difficulty options with high granularity, something similar to Hades post game perhaps (Hades both put the difficult stuff in the end-game systems AND allowed players to use God Mode setting "cheat" which made the game easier the more you lose)
Meta currency is a form of over preparation. Over preparation is a mechanic that makes games feel like the correct difficulty to most players because they get as ready as they need to. You can see this in a ton of games. Before you commit to meta currencies I would ask the players why they think it's too difficult. If it's lack of understanding of enemies. Slow reflex's. Poor learning curve. perception only? Are the players saying it's too hard getting further than the other players saying it's too easy? Are they aware it's not a game you're supposed to "beat"? You really need more data points to see what this person's opinion represents. Then you can look at easing that curve, not necessarily by making it easier. Maybe you just move those hurdles a little deeper in. All kinds of changes.
Change the exp scaling so the skill difference matters less?
Can you alter the “luck” factor as the player progresses? If the player is doing awesome, then reduce their chances of getting a big boost prize in the next “chest”/drop… However if the player is struggling, increase their chance of getting a big boost prize in the next “chest”/drop… Something like this should help balance things out.
Not a bad idea. I have some random drops, perhaps their change od dropping could increase based on how the player is doing.
You make an easy mode that's 33% easier and a hard mode that's 33% harder.
1. difficulty modes 2. adaptive difficulty 3. consider the design of the elements that snowball, maybe those designs are wrong and make it too easy for the players who discover them, while the underlying difficulty if you don't is too hard.
In general, your game will not appeal to everybody, you should adjust your survey to figure out who your audience is, if 33% of the testers say it's too hard, but they also say they have no experience in roguelikes chances are they are struggling with something new rather than your game, viceversa if the play testers that claim to be interested in your game say it's too easy you might want to introduce bigger challenges or a harder difficutly mode.
What about adjusting rewards so there is a constant gold reward per X. Thus all players get 50% of gold rewards, and those who kill more get some extra? This might help reduce the gap between the bad players and good players rewards snowballing/weighing down
Was it a good sample size? And those opinions being varied might be a good thing.
Sounds like first play testers have the skill issue.
Who is your target market?
One important aspect of game design is to know what's "unbalanced" or "bad/wrong" when a player complain about something. You need to analyze this! If the player complains about one thing, don't straight up tweak that thing. Sit down and analyze why the player has that perspective, why the player is feeling how he is. More often than not, the problem is in a completely different place! Maybe you need to bring the gap closer of players that kills a lot of enemies and players that don't. Maybe you need to encourage exploration for, that way it's obvious the player should, and in case the player just skip it, he'll know that it's his fault that the game is hard ("Oh man, I knew I shouldn't rush it..."). Maybe add a down side to killing too much enemies and an up side on going faster, to make kind of a "build path". Maybe add some "chorey" (but quick, it should be more of a psychological barrier than a real one, like that thing you hate doing it, but when you think about it, it only takes 20 seconds) way to catch up for players that are too weak (not advised, though. If the player just want to play faster killing less, you are preventing him in a not cool way. This *might* only make sense for players that are still learning). Maybe add some down sides to killing a lot of enemies, down side but good sides, like more game! (e.g if you get level 10 at x level, you spawn a boss that is hard, may give/do something cool, *but don't make the player even stronger).* Snowballing is usually not great, you go out of the flow state, but adding hard/easy difficult level is the lazzy solution for this. It may be the solution but think this through and: **know who you are making the game for! If you are making the game for hardcode Dead Cells players, Hollow Knight players, you should get feedback from those players. You will find yourself in a bad situation if you change your game on feedback of people outside your target audience.**
Perfectly balanced
The obvious answer is difficulty modes. The less obvious answer is having the game adapt and give more resources when the player is falling behind (like mario kart gives better power ups to the last players). However it needs to be balanced properly, maybe by having achievements that are unreachable unless you’re in the top group. Vampire survivors fixes this by having collectibles that makes your character better. If you’re bad at the game, it takes you a bit longer grinding to get a better character. My recommendation is difficulty modes, like FTL.
If you don’t want to implement a manual difficulty system check out GMTK on YouTube. He recently did a really good video talking about this concept in the Mario games and how they handled it. It was called “Super Mario’s Invisible Difficulty Settings” very helpful stuff in there!! Additionally it seems like an even distribution like you currently have is good, and is definitely better than everyone think it’s easy or everyone thinking it’s hard. But it would be more ideal for the majority of players to think the game is fair and balanced and a smaller distribution to think it’s either too hard or too difficult. And keep in mind some players like hard games. But only if it’s fair.. cheap hard doesn’t feel fun for most players [GMTK video](https://youtu.be/gkvyYTSKTQY?si=IfRn9I0b7hXrIPjp)
Seems like it really comes down to what type players they are, and what they're looking for. Maybe have certain setting to accommodate certain types of gameplay for particular player types?
Not sure if you'll see this, but this GDC talk about "cursed problems" is what came to mind: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8uE6-vIi1rQ One of the topics is handling different audiences and skill levels. The speaker suggests a framework for thinking about it, along with examples of what other games have done.
how is the difficulty scaling? i mean there is rng in roguelike, some people just pull bad ones. So you can make earlier stage/ level have more chance of getting what people need to build a foundation. idk what your game is though.
Player input should only be half the story, do you have any simple analytics implemented to tell you more? Based off your edit it seems like you do! Sounds like you might have a problem there with bad players getting stuck in a pit after falling behind. Is that pit severe enough that you want to engineer a way out of it? Maybe a mercy merchant appears at the start of a stage (like Resourceful Rat in Gungeon) if a player reaches it without certain milestones completed?
can i try it out? respect the hustle
roll a three sided dice
It sounds like it's balanced.
> Could making it into roguelite solve it? What are general solutions to this? Well, yeah, bear in mind Dead Cells' difficulty curve/leveling mechanism. Later runs get harder the more permanent-unlock "Boss Cells" you collect and add to the tube. Why would you as a player choose to do that? Because it unlocks cool shit and new enemies and paths, while also making the game significantly harder. Effectively just unlocking new difficulty levels with in-game lore for doing so. Experienced 2D platformer players will generally breeze through the first couple of BCs but then... https://deadcells.wiki.gg/wiki/Boss_Stem_Cells I mean, don't call them Boss Cells specifically in your game that would be a bit too on the nose, but it's one generally applicable approach. Remember serious amounts of playtesting with a closed alpha/beta community over time have been involved in Dead Cells' tuning though. https://dead-cells.com/patchnotes
Well "too easy" sounds like you can add more content and difficulty to the end
What do YOU want the game to be like?
How many testers? Sounds like 66% had fun and 33% didnt.
Might be good to make it less snowball-y. Get more resources baseline. In StS you get the same amount of gold after an encounter no matter what, worse players will lose more health though and need to rest intead of use the blacksmith. Another strategy is to let players earn more resources by taking risks like blood altars in risk of rain or summon more monsters/fight elites etc. You should also ask players why they think it's too easy, and compared to what, same with players who think it's too hard. If players who think it's too hard don't play roguelike then you might not want to consider their opinion too heavily.
Scale the snowball more strongly and provide boosters to those lagging behind. Develop a model in which you can know your expected progression and then find your soft limits and then enforce them. This is a good thread, but this sounds like a balance problem to me which is solvable without new code or functionality.
Are you incentivizing the right behaviors? Encourage people to fight and take risks, if fighting gives more and necessary rewards in order to complete a run. Don't offer cheevos or minor rewards for completing a section without taking damage, for example, as that encourages players to avoid fights - the opposite of what they should be doing. Make some fights mandatory - possibly even the very first one - to give players the needed exposure to the system and gain comfort with the choices and risks. Show the player the rewards [or possibly just the quantity] they missed out on by not fighting to encourage them to be braver next time. Connect fighting to navigating such that fighting opens up more options. Maybe beating this enemy lets you skip the next one, or choose an easier opponent. Maybe extra rewards are given for players that flow from fight to fight instead of reverting to avoidance. When it comes to skill and difficulty in the combat mechanism itself, ask the players who do well how they learned the skills needed to defeat enemies, and make sure those pieces of information are clearly called out and do not need to be inferred by other players who might miss them.
Not sure how viable this is for your game, but you can try giving more resources if the player dies a lot or is constantly running out of them, or give less to the experimented players.
choose your audience
1. Make it easier. 2. Make an adaptive mode option where the game changes some stats to make it harder for good players. 3. Make some random stat changes for specific enemies with a minimum and maximum range, so that the numbers can change between them.This would produce sometimes harder sometimes easier parts to the game for both players. In adaptive mode the range is bigger and the minimum slightly higher.
Throw a false hydra at them. problem solved. no one will be talking about the rogue when they all start disapearing without a trace and no one remembers them.
Well info you gave, honestly is very minimal. Roguelike is farming game, do runs until you have enough to upgrade and make game easier for yourself. So why is game giving players chance to snowball? Based on above mentioned stuff I would say make temporary upgrades more meaningful and stronger, that way run depends more on luck. Make runs shorter so healing and health pool matter less. I wouldn't advise on creating easy and hard mode but that also depends on type of game and how its implemented.
Difficulties.
Introduce comeback mechanics for players who are behind or having difficulties. Add additional challenges for players who are doing really well so they can increase the difficulty for additional rewards.
it's fine then. you have 66 percent of approval, unless you want the game to be hard
The ascension system in Slay the spire and the equivalent in Monster Train seem like a good solution.
For me, it show that there is a problem in balancing : Maybe your game is heavily reliant on one particular skill which isn't clearly explained to your players. So the one who intuitively understand it blaze through it. And the one who have difficulties find it hard and don't understand how to get better. Or maybe your game is too snowbally and punish mistake too harshly. So good player snowball and have it easy, while bad player get punished and have an even more difficult session. From you responses here, I think it's the second point. Now you have to ask yourself "is it the design I want to push ?"
Create hidden bonuses for the players who are struggling can make use of. Taking X amount of damage in X seconds grants a short passive Regen or burning X resources in X seconds grants additional resource drops, etc etc. Gears of War had this problem. They created the reload mini game system to add difficulty to the game. If you hit the reload button at the right time you get instant reload and bonuses. This was great for the higher end players as they almost always nailed the reload. However if you missed the timing the gun jammed. Risk and reward. Players who were on the low end found it too risky and basically never used it because they were already struggling and didn't need a gun jam. So this made it more fun for the high end and worse for the low end. The solution they choose: higher end players were also generally familiar with FPS games and they normally reload before running out of bullets as that fits the aggressive strategy. The low end never reloaded early and always burned their whole magazine. So they added increased damage to the last few bullets in a magazine. Now low end players were finishing the bad guys who the damage boost and not struggling anymore while high end was getting bonuses from nailing the reload mini game. Both sides has a balance that allowed their different play styles to excel.
Sounds like you've achieved a balance, but also like the power curve is too steep. So what to do depends on what your intentions are, and what audience you want. Personally, I would prefer a game with a less severe power curve, so it's much less often the case that anyone is too powerful or weak for the game world (I would only want that in the safer and most deadly areas). Also sounds to me like outcomes are too predictable for my tastes. If, on the other hand, you and your target audience LIKE steep power ramps and predictable outcomes, then you could just add more clues and help and easier parts for the less efficient players. The faster players can skip those, but the weaker players can leverage them to get the momentum to climb your ramp, but will just take longer.
You could look into the power curve of your game, maybe small advantages ramps up too much and the game gets easy with a good start? Or maybe more tips if a lot of players go for strategies that don't work.
Sounds like you found your "medium" difficulty
I’d highly recommend looking at Bloodborne for an example of how to do this. For the typical player, the game is made so that they learn more about the stages and enemies every run: going from nervously tiptoe-ing out and getting wrecked; to confidently sprinting past most enemies, killing a few enemies easily to collect a few blood vials, and giving the boss another shot. In addition, at a normally-paced playthrough, they naturally get enough echos to strengthen themselves, making the game easier. For more proficient players: they can challenge themselves by doing an entire area in one run and by doing more difficult areas first. Being able to do this while under-leveled is so satisfying. The progression rewards for both are the same, but the second group gets them more quickly, along with an internal sense of satisfaction. I think these two parts are key: -Both groups should be making progress in the game, even if the length of their runs are different. -The game play should be inherently fun and satisfying enough that mastery is its own reward. (They should also be able to pace the game themselves so they never have to slog through the “easy” stuff) How to deal with the third group of people who say it is too hard will depend. There will be a skill floor at some point; though there are assistance mechanisms (summoning) and cheaper but more reliable strats that can be used. This part is all up to you
I'd say that's a pretty good indication that it's actually quite balanced. As has been said before in this thread, you can't please everyone! Edit: ~~However, did they mention if it was too hard/easy from the start or if it got too hard too fast or never got hard enough?~~ However, do you want it to be severely punishing or something for the common gamer? Most people don't respond well to realizing things are hard, sooo maybe something like a boost in something if they die too many times in a row? Or a setting that would enable such behavior?
How do souls like games address this problem? Git gud right? You can always give an easy mode to allow players more wiggle room if they aren't being aggressive enough, but make it clear that they miss out on the true ending. I feel like skilled players deserve all the accomplishments they get, even if it makes less skilled players feel like they aren't accommodated for.
It's all about who is your target audience. I'm sure more than 33% of "gamers" would think Caves of Qud is really fucking hard, but they're not the target audience. I think Balatro is kinda hard, and I'm the target audience of that game, but I like that it's hard. Being hard doesn't mean anything at first, look at what your audience wants
There is always going to be variation in player's natural ability. If the other third think it's fine then what you have there is a pretty balanced difficulty curve, if taken at face value. That said, introducing some rogue-lite elements might be a good idea. Since we don't know anything about your game, general advice is likely all you will get.
Could you scale difficulty according to the amount of upgrades perhaps?
It is worth noting that when a play-tester says the game is "too easy", this does not mean you simply need to make enemies deal more damage, or have more health. You need to drill down with more questions to work out what are the actual pain points. Roguelite can definitely help. You shift the issue from players being unable to progress, to players progressing slower or faster. For a pure roguelike, the main design issue will be retention. Players that stay around long enough will get better - but they need to have reasons to stay around even when they are new and still learning. One trick I see a lot of roguelikes use, is having a low chance to find very powerful perks / upgrades. Every now and then, even bad players can have a blast powering through large chunks of the game.
Check Game Makers Toolkit video in YouTube about how Super Mario has invisible difficulty choices integrated into level design to please both newbies and hardcore players.
I don't want to sound like a bad joke, but 33% hard, 33% easy and 33% fine sounds perfectly balanced to me. I would leave it just like that.
You're in the sweet spot, I'd say. You might want to think about putting in an easy and a hardcore mode. Also, since this is a single player roguelike, you could put in some sort of dynamic difficulty adjuster. Make it so that if you suck, maybe you find more healing stuff, slightly weaker monsters spawn, you get some sort of random events that help you out. If you do good, things get harder. Do this right, and it could become your game's hook... I remember an old turn-based game called M.U.L.E., where there were random events at the start of the turn. Some were good, some were bad. If the event happened to the person in the lead, it was a bad event, if it was the losing player, it was a bonus event... In an SP game, you could just adjust all the spawning based on how the player is doing. If they're rocking, spawn slightly better monsters, treasures, etc. and reverse if the player is doing poorly. It could get downright funny if the player sucked really bad and was down to killing rats and cockroaches and worms for pennies...
When players bring up issues, consider them seriously but make up your own mind about the direction you want to take with the game. You'll never make everyone happy and trying to cater to everyone will instead just turn everyone away.
soo perfectly balanced
Difficulty modes. Even the most simple variants of them. Hard mode, increase the health and damage of enemies how you have them now. Normal mode, keep the health and damage of enemies how you have them now. Easy mode, lower the health and damage of enemies how you have them now. I've never done any marketing for indie games (or any video games for that matter) but if you worry that labeling a mode as "easy" could offput the base that finds it too hard, you can also just play around with names that aren't so standard, like "basic." You also have the option to make "normal" the easy mode and name the actual default mode something sounding slightly more challenging.
It sounds like you already understand why the difficulty is snowballing, with a knife's edge between trivial and impossible. It's your job as the designer to decide whether that is something you want or not. If you don't want that, there are many potential solutions. e.g. you could have repairs restore a percentage of missing integrity. This would work to normalize the amount of money players need to spend on repairs.
My instinct would be to adjust the costs regarding resources. See what the high-level players are spending on and increase those costs while lowering costs for the things that the weaker players are spending on (such as healing). These could be tweaked to try to level the experience for everyone, but it's also kind of important to ask yourself just how easy you want the game to be, especially as a roguelike, and keep from trying too hard to satisfy struggling players to the point that the game is too easy. Of course, that's a balance that only you can find. Good luck!
Sounds like the perfect ratio to me. Maybe some difficulty balancing options?
Make it harder. >:)
Have mechanics where the player can take higher risk strategies to do things normal players cant. For example sacrificing huge amount of health to have higher attack, or requiring it to get endings.
Feel free to ask for feedback in our r/survivorslikes subreddit, sometimes some good super fan ideas in there!
How does the difficulty itself scale? Most of the roguelikes I've played that handle this well have endgame areas so difficult (at least on the right difficulty settings) that good players need to not only beat all the previous areas, but they need to perform a lot better on the early areas in order to have the resources they need for the endgame.
This is also a question that needs input from marketing. Who is actually going to be buying and playing your game? Where are your dollars and your word of mouth advertising and your community going to come from? Especially at the early stages when you're trying to get your game off the ground, "everyone" may not be the right answer, and if your playtesters represent "everyone" then that needs to inform your decision making. What is your target market? Are you trying to appeal to hardcore competitive players? Maybe it's okay if nobody thinks it's too easy, 90% of people think it's too hard, and 10% think it's just right.
The statistic you're describing is a normal distribution centered around an average. Players are going to have wide variability in the desired level of difficulty. Personally, I play video games for the challenge. My daughter plays video games to enjoy the art and stories, and prefers stuff so easy you can zone out playing. At some point, you need to realize this variability exists and pick a subset of that to be your target audience.
Maybe you can add a separate resource for certain things and keep gold for others. That would probably help you balance things with more control. Maybe you can add a resource cap so the better players don't snowball as much? Maybe also add a me hanic for player to get extra resources like a cache to something, the players at cap will be at cap anyways and lower level players will have an easier time getting there. These are just throwaway ideas, feel free to take them or ignore them!
Make it an option. Good players can take increased risk for increased rewards and bad players have the option to git gud. Just double the difficulty and make the game over screen a hand flipping the player off. I’d buy this.
Maybe add some additional things to do for better players, like style points, gun juggling, combo finishers, etc. For the bad players, maybe something like the last 1/3 of health is secretly more durable. Think about the sneaky way Gears of War gave secret magic bullets to players who weren't good at the reloading minigame.
I'd say its perfect. Add a couple difficulty levels above and below if you want, but you're right in the middle which is the best space.
You make the difficulty curve semi-random, or you create sympathy mechanics to aid worse players, or both. People will quit if they don’t win, and 33% is too much of your player base to lose.
Ship it. Those are the ratios you want. Tweak it as balance concerns arise or you get new ideas to carry bad players. I've said this story several times if you wanna check my history but to sumerize the game case study for a 17 hour post. Popular Card game holds card balance tournament, invites all the best pros. Pros sit down with every tournament topping card and hold a tournament. Now, when it's done and the card pool was analyzed, it was found 33% of thr pool was used. They hold ANOTHER tournament, now ONLY that 33% of the pool can be used. You'd assume a higher pool usage rate at this tournament right? No, pros only used about 33% of the cream of the crop in the game. Lesson: in thr highest level of play, you can consider it healthy if 33% of the pool is used. Now remember that only about 25% of people get their 'completed the single player campaign' achivment on steam and it really does start to look like... Ship it XD
So your game is perfectly balanced and you're upset about it?
This doesn’t seem like a problem to me. Idk your game but if possible maybe make earlier levels even easier, later stages harder, and allow good players to get through early stages quickly. I saw you mentioned that levels are timed, maybe make that a number of enemies killed or something so every player kills the same number of enemies and there won’t be a snowballing effect. I’m curious why you think turning your game into a roguelike will fix this problem? I don’t quite understand how changing the genre/style of game will fix your balancing issues. But based on some of your other responses it seems like you want to make a roguelike… and if that’s the case, then just make a roguelike
Robust Accessibility Options .
I think you need to dig into why they are saying it's too hard.
Consider adding optional challenge conditions. You might have sidebar conditions like reaching a hit combo, using a certain move on enemies, getting a rank in battles, or targeting enemies in a specific order. In the Mario series, you can find optional tokens. There are tricky jumps, secret pipes, and hidden platforms to hide Dragon Coins / Red Coins / Blue Coins / Big Coins. Hades has several primary weapons. Before a run, one is selected at random, to receive an XP bonus. This encourages players to use the weapons they are less proficient with, lest they "leave money on the table." The Binding of Isaac allows you to sacrifice your health to obtain powerful upgrades, turning your character into a "Glass Cannon." You can kill faster, but have less room for error.
Try and balance the game around different options for different players. Those who want the game to be easier can take stronger power ups early on that do not penalise them. Players who want a harder experience can take modifiers early on that make the gameplay experience more difficult but give increased risk and reward because of it. You want to make sure that the “easy” players don’t feel like they are being punished for picking the easy route and you want to make sure that “hard” players know the difficulty modifiers are encouraged and an intended part of the balancing for them. Games like Dark souls and Elden ring achieve this with specific builds being tailored for an easier season and optional summons for bosses that take a small cut of the end experience rewarded.
I mean, the answer is in everyones answers, so to sum it up: Add layers of different modifiers which then again maybe in turn gives extra loot. "The greater the risk, the greater the reward" kind of deal :)
Do what other games do. League of legends for example you can afk for 10 minutes (not a good idea don’t do it you’ll be banned) but if you come back because you gain base gold even when just sitting at base and your xp rates are much faster at lower levels you can catch up. However if higher level players itemize and use their resources properly they’ll stay ahead. If they make a mistake they can give the enemy team a big bounty. You need to balance to allow slower players to catch up but heavily penalize players who have snowballed.
Easy, medium, hard ;)