Posted September 28, 2019 by pedronave
#difficulty #game design #postmortem
Hey everyone! For
the Weekly Game Jam 115 (the theme was Life is Short) I developed Time To Live,
a retro styled game where you have to route packets to their correct places and
avoid collisions between packets.
If you played the game you'll know that it is very (I mean veeeery) difficult. So here's my take on how you shouldn't develop hard games, based on my experience with Time To Live.
The difficulty modifiers are what change the difficulty of the game (shocker!). The modifiers can work through different aspects. The following list contains some modifier types and examples of how they can make games easier. Of course the opposite example can be used to make the game harder
When I was making TTL some of the difficulty modifiers considered were:
At the end of the day, only the packet rate and the tick speed were implemented. Yup, TTL's packets don't actually have a TTL (oops), the spawn locations are determined completely randomly (with the exception that a pipe must spawn a packet of a different type) and the points are constant through difficulty levels.
Having determined the difficulty modifiers, you have to determine the difficulty settings. These are the specific values for the difficulty modifiers.
In Time To Live you can define the difficulty modifiers (spawn rate and tick rate) before playing. This can be done in two ways.
Although the player can set the values manually, there are two problems:
This was one of the problems with TTL, due to time constraints, by the time I realized the presets were way off, it was already too late to update them.
There are other problems in the difficulty level of the game besides the modifiers.
All in all, I think this was a pretty successful attempt at a two day game, and the lessons learned from it will surely improve future games and if you got here, hopefully you can also take something out of it!
Thanks for reading!
PS: Special thanks to Lauwwie for his play testing and invaluable feedback!