Casual Game DesignDesigning games everyone can enjoy

One of the tougher challenges of designing a game is getting the difficulty right. Make it too difficult and players might be put off quickly, make it too easy and players will lose interest. Juuso Hietalahti advises to use several difficulty levels, but I’m not sure I agree with him.

I think designing should take into account at least 2 or 3 modes from easy to difficult (or from normal to difficult). In Hightailed game there’s total of 4 difficulty modes in the latest version. One is extremely easy, two others are bit harder and the last one is made as difficult as possible.

The problem I have with this advice, is that you are giving the player a choice she might not be able to make. Chris Bateman put it like this:

To begin with, let’s look at the classic static solution to game difficulty - giving the player a choice between Easy, Normal and Hard. This approach is better than nothing, but it has insurmountable problems. How does the player, who has never played your game before, determine which difficulty level is right for them? One can argue that they can always start playing on one difficulty level and change it if it’s wrong - but that could be several hours down the line. If they’re playing on the wrong difficulty level, the game may not be fun for them - it’s just as likely that they’ll give up the game in frustration or boredom as consider changing the difficulty level.

Also, you’re not really solving the problem, you’re just moving it around a bit. After all how hard should ‘hard’ be, and how easy ‘easy’? Instead of dealing with the problem once, you have now split it into three (or more) similar problems. And if you’re not careful you might end up with a situation that is similar to gears on a bike: no matter how much you have of them, you always want the one in between.

The question you need to ask is: who are my target audience? Could it be that you don’t know how difficult you should make your game because you haven’t clearly defined your target audience yet? If you are dealing with a game literate audience, then difficulty levels may be okay, because your players will be able to choose a difficulty level based on their experience with previous games. You still need to balance the levels correctly, though. If your audience is strictly casual, you can take Jason Kapalka’s advice. I remember him saying: “I don’t believe a casual game has ever failed because it was too easy.”

How you deal with difficulty in your game depends a lot on what type of game you are trying to make. For a racing game, dynamically adjusting the difficulty level might be an option. With a puzzle game, difficulty levels might be inherent in the puzzles themselves. All you need to do then is make sure that all puzzles are available from the start (no unlocking puzzles, please). And maybe, in your particular game, difficulty levels might actually be the best solution. If that’s what you discover after thinking hard about it and testing a lot, that’s okay of course. Just don’t use difficulty levels as the de facto solution.

Edit: Did Chris Bateman change his mind?

Perhaps the most staggering absence in terms of game mode is the lack of difficulty settings. Now here it must be acknowledged that multiple difficulties do imply additional costs – in the QA stage of development perhaps more than in the design phases. But we can be no doubt that there are many players for whom the typical difficulty of videogames is considerably too hard for any enjoyment to be gleaned.

Where are the options that allow players easier versions of games such as Metroid Prime or Shadow of the Colossus? They are wholly absent, and this is typical of the majority of games from the upper market. Even though these particular games are specifically targeting a hardcore demographic at the centre of the gaming audience, why omit an easier mode? The stereotypical hardcore player often considers it failure just to select an easier mode, so the argument that easy modes undercut the challenge of the play seems fallacious.

Furthermore, in terms of the wider gaming audience, there can be no lower limit on difficulty. You simply cannot make a game too easy for the broadest conceivable audience. The player needs to be able to find their own level of challenge, and this may be substantially below where the game developer believes it should lie. Many players towards the casual end of the spectrum struggle simply to control the avatar – for these people, just moving around is an achievement!

(3 votes, average: 4.67 out of 5)

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