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What to do when your game is too easy and too hard? (lostdecadegames.com)
21 points by richtaur on Aug 29, 2010 | hide | past | favorite | 6 comments



My instinct is that one of the following two things is actually the problem:

1) There is a particular method of play that essentially trivializes the game (i.e. "If I walk into the corner and hold down this button, I win automatically.")

2) You're going for too broad a player base. Not everyone is going to be equally good at your game. From the perspective of the player, your game actually has different difficulty levels depending on the player. This is normal and expected. Nothing wrong with trying to tune the difficulty to where the most people are happy, but you're not going to make everyone happy.


It really sounds like it's (1) from one of the descriptions: "lol it was easy just spam the space bar with the 3 way swords shooting at every door"

So what you need to do is remove the too-easy strategies while maybe dropping the difficulty of the overall game. Sounds like this three-way sword is too powerful, or the doorways need to be arranged differently. There may well be other holes in the strategy too.

Balance is probably the hardest part of game design.


My first impulse is that this means your game is just boring. See this chart:

    ^   \good/
    |    \  /
 int|  too\/too
 ere| easy/\hard
  st|    /  \
    |   /    \
    |  /boring\
    |
    +--difficulty-->
The games above the NE-SW line are rewarding. The games above the NW-SE line are challenging. Perhaps your game doesn't offer enough reward for the challenge or enough challenge for the reward.


Csíkszentmihályi puts difficulty (challenge) and skill on the axes to map mental state (encapsulating interest).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_(psychology)#Conditions_fo...


The first thing I'd do is boo you for using Google Analytics. But I forgive you since I don't have a JS api yet. Here's how I handle balancing for my games:

http://playtomic.com/blog/post/9-trickochet-launched-today

http://playtomic.com/blog/post/10-an-update-on-trickochet


Fix the balancing issues.




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