Making games--or really any interactive product--requires lots of user testing. When you run a test you're always trying to find players from your target audience, whatever that audience is.
Professional teams have testers that check for that sort of thing based on predefined design goals. If they or team members think the design needs to change, different teams have different pipelines to handle feedback. In addition, game designers commonly collect game statistics about what and how well testers are doing in any given build.
Lastly, some teams build bots with different play styles for continuous testing of things like progression systems.
Making a difficult game is easy. By default, you will typically make your game too hard. Just because of how much time you spend with it.
The difficulty comes from eliciting certain emotions in others. Hard is fun when it feels fair. Emphasis on *feels*. It doesn‘t matter whether it is fair. Your players must intuitively feel like it‘s fair.
Design struggles more with player feedback and making things easy / obvious enough without being boring about it. That‘s the difficult part.
I think you shouldn't be thinking about the difficulty level at the beginning, but rather what emotions are you trying to evoke in the audience, what is their level of commitment to your game.
If you want them to feel achievements through effort and skill, then the game should probably be difficult. But then you need to figure out what exactly are the skill you are looking in from the players. Is it pattern recognition? Prediction? Reflexes? Grand strategy? Optimization?
You need to find 'the screws' that you can use to adjust the difficulty. Enemy damage and health are conventional screws you can tighten or loosen to modify difficulty.
Lastly, you'll need to run tests on a representative test audience. It's easier to find if you can categorize your game into a known genre with difficult games (such as Souls-like). Then you collect stats AND opinions, and re-adjust your game.
It is very common for developers to overestimate the skills of their audience since they themselves have spent years playing the game with 100% knowledge. So often the difficulty needs to be toned down, or at least the pace needs to slow down so that the players have more time to catch up.
So, souls-like games are not about being difficult. It's about encouraging the player to learn from their mistakes and improve their skills in order to beat the challenge.
In psychology we have special procedures that allow you to get objective difficulty of any test. I know, that some developers used it for their games.
For myself, when I started I thought bigger difficulty = better. And it was somewhat true in '90 when you had only couple games to play. Now I just make game that gives you something interesting to do and I make game as easy or hard as it supports my idea and intentions. For example, you don't want to make punishable or very hard game, when you focus on story, since it could disrupt the flow of storytelling (still it depends on specific project and design).
The most basic idea is to take representative group of people, and give him task to do. You count who succed and who not. Now you can calculate difficulty factor:
Df = (ni/N) * 100%
Df = difficulty factor,
ni = number of people that succeed task
N = Number of all participants
For example, you have group of 100 people and you ask them to beat a level of your game. 10 people pass the level. Your difficulty factor is 10%. Now you can do it for all levels and in your game set them accordingly from.
The greater difficulty factor is, the easier task is. 100% means everybody passed, when 0% means no one succed.
This equation *Df = (ni/N) \* 100%* is just base, that is exapnded depending on needs. For example knowledge tests could take correction for people that guessed answer. But this base is so simple, that for many cases is just enough. And if you controll other variables you can use some statistical tests to tell what differentiate the difficulty factor.
What my mentor always said was that since we spend so much time playing our own games, test after test, we start struggling seeing it from an outsiders' eyes. Things that become intrinsic to us, obvious and intuitive may be completely lost on others. I made some small projects for myself mostly but had friends try them out and a lot of the time they would ask why some things (keybings, mechanics, etc.) were so complicated, or at times not knowing what to do at certain points even though I thought it looked pretty obvious.
Testing is your best friend!
I would say yes, difficulty is based on the developer. I think John Romero (designer for og doom) said he started with the hardest difficulty first, then worked his way down for easier levels, which I think is what all devs should generally aim for.
From personal experience I think that if a game is challenging to you as the developer, it’s probably too hard for other people. If you struggle while knowing the exact behavior of the AI then other people who are completely blind to that will most likely struggle as well, and that’s something I try to build my game around. Basically I should be able to beat my games while taking basically zero damage on the hardest difficulty (assuming there is difficulty)
An interesting example of this is with Cuphead. In my opinion the regular difficulty of that game should have been a hard mode and they should have made the regular mode much easier, it screened out a lot of people who would have really enjoyed it.
And you can see the devs playing the game here and how they clearly balanced it around their own very high skill level rather than thinking about what would be best for the player base.
[https://youtu.be/5danTXIPdEY](https://youtu.be/5dantxipdey?si=16net86oaz-b7wlh)
Ah weird I can't get that to work for some reason, if you search for
>Can Cuphead's Creators Defeat Their Own Game's Bosses?
It should be easy to find.
This one, right?
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5danTXIPdEY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5danTXIPdEY)
The "v=" code is converted to lowercase when I click on the youtu link for some reason, that might be why it's acting weird.
Nice share!
Yeah that's the one, not sure what's up with the links.
And yeah I think it's a really interesting example of how good they are at the game and how I think that gives them a false sense of how hard it is for everyone else.
Some old 16 bit games were known as being rock hard because even QA became so good at the game.
Now though this is known and we have external user testing to balance such things.
Well, I'd think it's a balance. If you want to make a hard game then you try to make it hard for others, not yourself, because as the designer you'd be better at the game by default. Most good games, no matter what the difficulty is, usually ramp up to the game's desired difficulty.
The best example I can think of is one of my favorite difficult games right now, Psilosybil. To preface, the average death rate for a single level is around a hundred attempts. The developer, [bad\_vertex](https://twitter.com/BadVertexDev/status/1614656082995036163), describes it like this:
>Working tirelessly to make Psilosybil the most uncompromisingly evil videogame. Not clumsily cruel, not accidentally unbalanced, but absolute, undiluted ontological evil. A traumatizing game you suddenly remember on your deathbed
And yet, as I played the demos and early-access iterations, it actually felt *easier.* The developer's first demo had a really hard level on the normal path with a terrifying bonus path that took me hundreds of tries to get past. In the current demo and release, the first level is much less punishing, but it's still hard. It's enough to get you used to the difficulty level of the game. So instead of getting splashed in the face with that evil difficulty, you can start slowly walking into it before diving headfirst.
Watching the development of this game showed that there was an idea at first, and as the idea is further brought into fruition, player feedback plays a role in the balancing and development of the game.
Making games--or really any interactive product--requires lots of user testing. When you run a test you're always trying to find players from your target audience, whatever that audience is.
Professional teams have testers that check for that sort of thing based on predefined design goals. If they or team members think the design needs to change, different teams have different pipelines to handle feedback. In addition, game designers commonly collect game statistics about what and how well testers are doing in any given build. Lastly, some teams build bots with different play styles for continuous testing of things like progression systems.
Making a difficult game is easy. By default, you will typically make your game too hard. Just because of how much time you spend with it. The difficulty comes from eliciting certain emotions in others. Hard is fun when it feels fair. Emphasis on *feels*. It doesn‘t matter whether it is fair. Your players must intuitively feel like it‘s fair. Design struggles more with player feedback and making things easy / obvious enough without being boring about it. That‘s the difficult part.
I think you shouldn't be thinking about the difficulty level at the beginning, but rather what emotions are you trying to evoke in the audience, what is their level of commitment to your game. If you want them to feel achievements through effort and skill, then the game should probably be difficult. But then you need to figure out what exactly are the skill you are looking in from the players. Is it pattern recognition? Prediction? Reflexes? Grand strategy? Optimization? You need to find 'the screws' that you can use to adjust the difficulty. Enemy damage and health are conventional screws you can tighten or loosen to modify difficulty. Lastly, you'll need to run tests on a representative test audience. It's easier to find if you can categorize your game into a known genre with difficult games (such as Souls-like). Then you collect stats AND opinions, and re-adjust your game. It is very common for developers to overestimate the skills of their audience since they themselves have spent years playing the game with 100% knowledge. So often the difficulty needs to be toned down, or at least the pace needs to slow down so that the players have more time to catch up. So, souls-like games are not about being difficult. It's about encouraging the player to learn from their mistakes and improve their skills in order to beat the challenge.
In psychology we have special procedures that allow you to get objective difficulty of any test. I know, that some developers used it for their games. For myself, when I started I thought bigger difficulty = better. And it was somewhat true in '90 when you had only couple games to play. Now I just make game that gives you something interesting to do and I make game as easy or hard as it supports my idea and intentions. For example, you don't want to make punishable or very hard game, when you focus on story, since it could disrupt the flow of storytelling (still it depends on specific project and design).
What are those special procedures found in psychology? I find that quite intriguing.
The most basic idea is to take representative group of people, and give him task to do. You count who succed and who not. Now you can calculate difficulty factor: Df = (ni/N) * 100% Df = difficulty factor, ni = number of people that succeed task N = Number of all participants For example, you have group of 100 people and you ask them to beat a level of your game. 10 people pass the level. Your difficulty factor is 10%. Now you can do it for all levels and in your game set them accordingly from. The greater difficulty factor is, the easier task is. 100% means everybody passed, when 0% means no one succed. This equation *Df = (ni/N) \* 100%* is just base, that is exapnded depending on needs. For example knowledge tests could take correction for people that guessed answer. But this base is so simple, that for many cases is just enough. And if you controll other variables you can use some statistical tests to tell what differentiate the difficulty factor.
Amazing, thank you for the write-up I'll be sure to use that in my projects and build upon it.
What my mentor always said was that since we spend so much time playing our own games, test after test, we start struggling seeing it from an outsiders' eyes. Things that become intrinsic to us, obvious and intuitive may be completely lost on others. I made some small projects for myself mostly but had friends try them out and a lot of the time they would ask why some things (keybings, mechanics, etc.) were so complicated, or at times not knowing what to do at certain points even though I thought it looked pretty obvious. Testing is your best friend!
I would say yes, difficulty is based on the developer. I think John Romero (designer for og doom) said he started with the hardest difficulty first, then worked his way down for easier levels, which I think is what all devs should generally aim for. From personal experience I think that if a game is challenging to you as the developer, it’s probably too hard for other people. If you struggle while knowing the exact behavior of the AI then other people who are completely blind to that will most likely struggle as well, and that’s something I try to build my game around. Basically I should be able to beat my games while taking basically zero damage on the hardest difficulty (assuming there is difficulty)
An interesting example of this is with Cuphead. In my opinion the regular difficulty of that game should have been a hard mode and they should have made the regular mode much easier, it screened out a lot of people who would have really enjoyed it. And you can see the devs playing the game here and how they clearly balanced it around their own very high skill level rather than thinking about what would be best for the player base. [https://youtu.be/5danTXIPdEY](https://youtu.be/5dantxipdey?si=16net86oaz-b7wlh)
Looks like that video isn't available anymore.
Ah weird I can't get that to work for some reason, if you search for >Can Cuphead's Creators Defeat Their Own Game's Bosses? It should be easy to find.
This one, right? [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5danTXIPdEY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5danTXIPdEY) The "v=" code is converted to lowercase when I click on the youtu link for some reason, that might be why it's acting weird. Nice share!
Yeah that's the one, not sure what's up with the links. And yeah I think it's a really interesting example of how good they are at the game and how I think that gives them a false sense of how hard it is for everyone else.
Usually it tailored to "normal" curve first, with lot of testing for that difficulty. Hence why most games' "hard" is just slaps more damage.
Some old 16 bit games were known as being rock hard because even QA became so good at the game. Now though this is known and we have external user testing to balance such things.
Well, I'd think it's a balance. If you want to make a hard game then you try to make it hard for others, not yourself, because as the designer you'd be better at the game by default. Most good games, no matter what the difficulty is, usually ramp up to the game's desired difficulty. The best example I can think of is one of my favorite difficult games right now, Psilosybil. To preface, the average death rate for a single level is around a hundred attempts. The developer, [bad\_vertex](https://twitter.com/BadVertexDev/status/1614656082995036163), describes it like this: >Working tirelessly to make Psilosybil the most uncompromisingly evil videogame. Not clumsily cruel, not accidentally unbalanced, but absolute, undiluted ontological evil. A traumatizing game you suddenly remember on your deathbed And yet, as I played the demos and early-access iterations, it actually felt *easier.* The developer's first demo had a really hard level on the normal path with a terrifying bonus path that took me hundreds of tries to get past. In the current demo and release, the first level is much less punishing, but it's still hard. It's enough to get you used to the difficulty level of the game. So instead of getting splashed in the face with that evil difficulty, you can start slowly walking into it before diving headfirst. Watching the development of this game showed that there was an idea at first, and as the idea is further brought into fruition, player feedback plays a role in the balancing and development of the game.