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Is my game too hard!? Help with difficulty balancing

A topic by ProjectLevel created Feb 18, 2025 Views: 280 Replies: 9
Viewing posts 1 to 5



looking for some feedback about difficulty balancing on DARK MOON ** Warning, the game does feature some jumpscares.** 

Can you help?

The game is 20 levels, and I think it may be too hard?

I'm struggling as i'm not getting enough data from my friends and family and i'm looking for some more opinions from a wider source of gamers who enjoy a difficult arcade game. You know the types, like me, in their 40's, chiseled from years of torment for 80's/90's retro games designed to destroy you. 

So far just myself and one other friend have managed to beat it. I wanted it to be a struggle in the sense of its not easy and it should be a challenge, but don't want it to be unfair or crushingly brutal. 
It's styled on very simple arcade controls, one joystick and two buttons. 
you can play it directly in the browser, and i'd love to hear some thoughts on it.

All the instructions are on the page and there are some helpful hints/tips at the bottom to help you through... I'd just want to see more people beat it! Main reason is before I put it on some other platforms, i'd like to give it one more round of refinement.

Any help is super appreciated, I really hope you have a fun/scary time if you do decide to try to get to its bitter end. 



(+1)

Salut, n’ayant pas de joystic et mon clavier ayant une disposition Azerty le control n’est pas des plus facile, mais j’aime l’idée du jeu , bonne continuation .

Interesting! i'd not considered azerty set up. I'll look into that! thank you

Fully customisable controls are a basic requirement, and should be easy to implement. It's currently unplayable for me too, for this reason.

I chose WASD as its the most common for movement, but for AZERTY keyboard users I'll look into that and make sure its applicable too. 

I don't use that either. I would use arrow keys, but my down arrow key is broken, and I hate WASD, so I have to go with something unconventional. There's no reason not to allow the player to configure whatever keys they wish.

I've not currently got the time to implement accessibility options until I've got more data on the actual game. I appreciate you having a look and I definitely recognise its a nice to have feature that will be added later. but right now it's not my immediate focus.  

Des touches paramétrable par le joueur ou bien un petit joystick virtuel  

(2 edits) (+1)

Hi, the game feels more unfair and unreasonably long rather than difficult. I didn't read the hints on the page so as not to spoil the first impression.
Here are some of my thoughts:

  • The game itself doesn't encourage you to carefully walk tile by tile waiting for enemies, but rather forces you to do that after many deaths. I think many players will try to play more actively and eventually give up quickly.
  • Enemies can spawn behind a box or an exit and kill you without being noticed. The lack of feedback and no damage delay on enemy attack also contributes greatly to this. It's really annoying when an enemy just sticks and constantly drain your HP.
  • Unclear melee damage, I counted from 2 to 6 hits on single enemy.
  • "Useful" items are more like a mockery. What difference does it make to me to know how many enemies are on the map if even one can suddenly appear and kill me in a second? Full auto fire with a constant shortage of ammo? No thanks.
  • When choosing between ammo and healing, the health bar disappears and it is not clear what to choose. 

After some experiments on the first levels, I decided to start a serious run. And on the 10 level with full health and a fairly large number of ammo, I was killed by a single enemy because of losing my concentration from the monotony. Although I think the game lost me several levels before. No challenge, no rewards, same levels and enemies.

Despite this, I liked the intro, the style and the overall atmosphere of the game.

Hi, thanks for giving it a go and giving some good feedback!   Overall it's meant to be bleak to match it's atmosphere. But I can understand it's perhaps too long. 

Knowing how many threats there are can be helpful with managing ammo and your speed through the level. If there's only 3 enemies you can be less cautious and move quicker, handy for later when your oxygen begins to run out. 

Melee is not supposed to be easy. If anything it's more of a deterrent and yes it can take a bunch of hits to kill one enemy.. the gun is your only sure fire way to kill them with one hit.  It's more like the knife from resident evil... It's not much use but it can kill things. 

The health bar shouldn't disappear when crafting so I will look into that, sounds like a bug.  And I'm aware of enemies spawning behind boxes, but they really shouldn't around the exit so again I'll look into that too. 

Monotony would probably be helped by reducing the levels by half or add more variety in enemies.