5sd064 Thomas Härdin Designing Level Difficulty

I’m Thomas Härdin. I study game design with more design specifically and currently i’m working on a space shooter game project with my group called Fenrir

For the past days I’ve been working on different difficulties for our game, difficulty as in different kinds of levels. Starting off we made sure that we had a base game to play and after we had a player ship that could move and shoot we added enemies who could do the same and spawn objects where they appeared from. This led to grant m
e the ability to change details like spawn frequency of the enemies, in which order they appear and how frequent they shoot. Really good functions for balancing. I spent the mentioned last few days setting up a copy of our project where i could add, delete spawns and change how they worked, thanks to this I’ve come to a point where i managed to create a fair but not boringly easy basic difficulty and i’m experimenting with making more challenging experiences for the player, this of course will come with some external play-testing since naturally i would have a greater understanding about the game and therefore an easier time beating it.

So, what would an example of the difference between easy and medium difficulty be? Well the way I’ve done it was with the basic version of 3 spawns which means 3 enemy ships spawning on different lanes in a slow frequency and uneven order. It was not a challenge for anyone in the group to beat. However when i made a version with 5 spawns and slightly faster spawn frequency it actually required considerable effort to beat, that with regards to the fact that i made it and should have an easier time in general than most players. Going forward from this i will have people outside of our group test these prototypes of difficulties to make sure it contains the right amount of challenge warranting if its easy or medium. If this process goes well i can include the hard difficulty as well which is the third and final level version we have planned on as a group so far.

About Thomas Härdin

2016 Game Design

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