At 5/4/08 05:32 PM, I-smel wrote:
At 5/4/08 04:55 PM, UnknownFury wrote:
What would you guys say is the best way to come up with levels for a puzzle game that are challenging?
Try to avoid having it start off easy and then get gradually harder and harder. A player might develop fatigue where they've done like 3 hard puzzles in a row and just stop playing. So while you're making sure the challenges get harder, make sure to throw an easy one in every so often.
This got me thinking about difficulty curves.
I still regard G&W gallery 2 (or maybe 3) on the GBC to be the epitome of difficulty ramping. Due to the simple nature of the games and lack of new elements, it's fairly easy to measure the difficulty - just a measure of the speed. However, rather than tie in speed to time (for example) they have some formula where
Speed = K(score%100)+L((score-(score%100))/100)
K and L are unknown constants.
In other words, speed ramps up steadily up until 99 points, at which point it drops of suddenly, getting harder until 199, dropping off etc. See the graph below.
Also, because increased speed means your score is increasing faster, there's a bit of a curve - probably more than in my totally-not-to-any-scale graph below.
Do you guys have any games that you aspire to in terms of their difficulty curve?
Also, I recently finished playin through the Orange Box. It comes with Developer Commentary that's like a lesson in level design. It's mint.
I bought a stupid fucking mac and can't play it without getting finicky software. I reckon I'll buy it today after finally finishing college work and hope my bro's PC is powerful enough to run it. Harumph.