Designing Difficulty: Introduction

A game's difficulty is a pretty fundamental component of its design, but despite that importance many developers haven't given the level of attention to the issue that they should. Part of the problem is that the optimal level of difficulty depends heavily on a slew of other factors--game genre, target audience, particular game mechanics, etc.

What's clear is that a suboptimal level of difficulty can have severe consequences for a game's quality and popularity. Too hard, and otherwise superb games like F-Zero GX can flop in sales and frustrate even fans of the game. Too easy, and games can be considered to be shallow or "kiddie", even when they have interesting gameplay. Of course, setting a good level of difficulty is more complex than just picking a spot along the "easy--hard" continuum, but that move is a start.

So where you do begin when deciding a game's difficulty? One good place to start is figuring out a difficulty system to use. Do you want every player to experience the same thing? Do you want adjustable difficulty settings? Maybe you want to use a dynamic system that adjusts how hard a game is as the player progresses? These are some of the more obvious routes available, and I'll discuss them in the next post, but there are other, more subtle options for difficulty systems that I'll also get into.