Skip to main content

How Tough Are You?

Whenever I am given the option to choose a difficulty in new games I tend to choose "easy".  The reason I tend to do this is that the majority of the time the game is absolutely no different except you tend to do more damage while the bad guys tend to do less.  It really bothers me when games do this and ruins the entire point of a difficulty selection.  However there are games out there that use the difficulty selection as actual game play.  My favorite examples of this are Wolfenstein 3D and Doom.  


When you picked a difficulty setting it would either add or remove enemies to maps.  So the designer was designing the experience.  These gave way to awesome gameplay experiences and replay ability.  Maybe on one difficulty setting you could run right through a room but on the next difficulty setting maybe there were two or three bad guys in the room ready to ambush you.  Plus the enemies actual difficulty was still the same you were just dealing with more difficult situations.  So you could actually build up your skill as a player.  I would love to see more examples of this in modern games, and maybe there are and I just haven't seen them.  Too many games come out to keep track of or really spend time with so I am sure there are gems out there.  If you have any hidden gems of this example let me know I would love to check them out!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Random Level Generation

The level generation system in This Is Dungeon  uses a few different ideas to produce the final levels but I'm just going to go over the first right now.  Levels are generated using the Dungeon-Building Algorithm by Mike Anderson .  This algorithm is very simple to implement and gives really good results.  The levels generate very quickly and the player is guaranteed to be able to reach every room of the level. random dungeon no choke point. After playing around with the generated levels in game I started wanting to be able to break the map up into multiple sections.  Since the features are built one at a time from a previously built room I realized I could just tell the generator how many sections I wanted to break the map up into and divide that by the number of rooms it was trying to generate.  The result being the number of rooms that should go into each section.  With that info you just keep track of the rooms already built and when tha...
Post a Comment
Read more

Level Buddy | Blender Addon

An old-school CSG inspired level editor add-on for Blender 3D. The add-on is still very much a work in progress but fairly solid for blocking spaces super quickly.  Just because graphic fidelity has gotten insanely good and hyper detailed doesn't mean we shouldn't look back how older games were put together, at least that is my opinion.  One thing I always come back to is how quickly the tools in the first 2 versions of Unreal Ed 2 and Doom level editors allowed anyone to block out a level, iterate on feedback or try an idea out.  So I just took some time to put together a similar pipeline right in my 3d package of choice.  I wanted to keep it simple and quick to try out level design ideas.  You can use it for simple white boxing of your level, break it up into multiple static meshes and import them into your game engine of choice or  you can use that as your starting point to start more detailed modeling ....
Post a Comment
Read more

Balance

Right now I am in the throws of balancing.  Not game balance but life balancing.  At work we are currently trying to wrap up our game and so things are rather busy.  At home both my kids AND my wife's birthdays are coming up in the next couple of weeks.  So things feel rather difficult to balance properly.  I was on track to get a simple blog post every week day for almost two months but I was only able to get through last month. At first I was pretty bummed that I missed a few days and then the old habits started to kick in again so it seemed like a good time to post something to keep the juices flowing.  I doubt anyone really comes here on a regular basis, I assume most people that find their way here do so from one of my posts somewhere else.  But I'd like to spend some more time putting things here instead of scattered all over the place so I will try and keep posting things as often as I can but for the next month or so the posts might have a fe...
Post a Comment
Read more