Creating A Challenge

There are many things that go into creating a game. What genre do you want to do? What will your game look like? What can you do to make the game fun? However a question that is often overlooked is how do you make your game difficult? At first glance it seems easy enough to answer. However, as you continue to develop your game, it quickly becomes apparent just how difficult of a question it is to answer.

To begin, you need to think about the question within the context of the game you’re making. After all, a game that’s centered around platforming will have a radically different idea of difficulty in comparison to an overworld fighting game. It’s only once you fully understand the kind of game you’re making that you can even begin to earnestly answer the question. Then there’s the fact that some genres will be easier to adjust difficulty wise than others. With a platformer like Mario, you’ll likely either put in more jumps for a player to do or make it harder to jump from platform to platform. With a game like Elder Ring though you can simply just give your enemies more health and leave it that. However, this leads into another problem with game difficulty: is it still fun to play at a higher difficulty?

While simply increasing enemy health is a common way to increase difficulty, it is also an easy way for combat to feel repetitive and boring. After all, if the only thing that differs between easy and hard mode is that enemies have a bit more health, can you really call that fun? Now, I will admit that with some games simply increasing health is enough to change the game dramatically. In certain cases it will cause players to have to deal with a particularly hard phase of a boss fight for longer than they did originally and adjust accordingly. However, in most cases something more must be done in order to improve game difficulty besides simple health increases or more jumps.

In games that focus on combat trying adjusting enemy attack speeds or changing up their attack patterns. With platformers instead of just adding more jumps try changing up how players move so that they’re forced to be a bit more creative and tactical. But more importantly than anything, try putting yourself in the shoes of your players and thinking about what you’d want to see in a game. Sometimes all it takes is a different mindset to really make a difference.

 

 

 

 

Logan Floyd-Mcgee | Writer
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