Hello, I’m making a very detailed skill based game, but my question is that I need some feedback on how I can use Gimkit Creative to design a game that adapts to different skill levels, and what are some strategies to keep players engaged while making sure the game remains challenging?
To summarize, I need help making a game where it sees if the player is good enough to raise difficulty level automatically, while still keeping the fun and challenge aspect of the game.
A few basic methods (I’m kinda assuming you have some sort of battle system lol):
Keeping track of the total dmg the player has taken for how far in they are. You can use psuedo health and base it off the damage to progress ratio (the less damage they take the harder it gets).
You could add difficulty modes, and let the player choose (or give the ability to have a damage/health multiplier for enemies, but they give better stuff)
Before I continue, it’s probably best to know what type of game you’re making…
I believe “dynamic difficulty” is a better term for your idea, correct? Hm. Creating a proper dynamic difficulty system is difficult without first specifying the type of game you’re making. Not all games are created equal, and the same is true for games with dynamic difficulty.
I am no game developer but if I were to create such a system, I’d first list down all the actions that the player can do well in and fail in. Using that list, I would use that list and somehow make that into an in-game system that can gauge a player’s skill perhaps through a point-like system. Now once the player reaches a certain amount of “points” the game will adjust to the player’s skill and hopefully make it more enjoyable.
I highly suggest if you’re interested in diving deep into the research put into dynamic difficulty. From the quick reading I’ve done, it’s been a bit of a hit or miss on how enjoyable a game is with dynamic difficulty, There isn’t a case of dynamic difficulty being perfect out there so it’s hard to gauge that balance of a slow difficulty increase and a massive spike in difficulty. If you do continue on this project of yours, I do suggest reading a couple articles such as this one and perhaps turn to your favorite games that incorporate dynamic difficulty.
First: What kind of game is it? If it’s a platformer, then maybe make 3 - 4 modes with the first being for 9 - year olds that can’t do that one jump on summit 6 on DLD. and the final one being for true gamers who do crazy stuff like beat YWHMFT on normal mode. Same thing for 1WO - esque games, if it’s a multiplayer arena game, make some sort of weird algorithm that makes the player’s loadout better of worse depending on their KDR.
Every mistake should feel like the player’s fault. You should avoid unfair gameplay, things that are just difficult but not fun. For example, if you turn off the ends of laser beams, the gameplay becomes more difficult. Although the ends of the lasers are not visible, they will still kill you if you touch them. Because of this, when you die to the end of the laser (something you can’t see), your first thought isn’t “I’m not good enough to beat this level”, it’s “This level is too hard and it sucks”. Although the laser beam example is an example pretty exclusive the platformer, you don’t ever want to set up a situation where the player will die and say “That death wasn’t my fault”.
Make it unique. Playing the same hard jump/thing over and over again becomes tedious and boring, and it’s something that will make players just want to stop. They already did the difficult jump, they don’t want to do it again. I’ve posted an image of what the first few jumps of my map look like, along with a black arrow showing the path the player takes. You can see that none of the jumps depicted in the image are the same, and all of them have the player doing different movements. This keeps the map new and fun.
Add a practice mode. This idea is a bit more optional, but if a difficult part has no checkpoints in it at all, you can make a practice mode by placing a button to enable/disable it. Enabling it places a bunch of checkpoints throughout the section, so that the player can learn the gameplay and improve, and repeatedly practice the areas they find the hardest. Unfortunately, Gimkit’s built-in checkpoints cannot do most the things you need them to do for a practice mode system, so you’d probably have to design your own checkpoint system. Make sure there’s a blocker at the very end of the map if someone chooses to play it in practice mode, so people can’t beat it in practice. At the end of my map, you fall down into a pit, and if you’re in practice mode, this blocker appears before you can get to the end.
Balance your gameplay. When the gameplay difficulty varies, the motivation to complete the map can fall down as it just becomes less fun. I recommend playtesting your map with other people, and note how long it takes those people to complete certain jumps/areas. It should take a similar time period for each area.
I know these are concepts I found through my development of a platformer map, but these do apply to really any difficult map. If you have any more details about your map then I can try and provide tips more relevant to what your map is about.
crap you’re right i didn’t read the middle paragraph
Well, game design aspects aside then, try putting the user up against a challenge, recording a metric of how they perform in that challenge (whether it be sentries beaten or time to complete a section), and if that metric beats a certain threshold, advance the player to the next area, or make the challenge more difficult. I recommend you make sure that even though the challenges vary in difficulty, there are plenty for each difficulty level so the player won’t get bored.
In the example of a dungeon game, you would go through rooms and as the time to complete each room decreases, the user would be served more difficult rooms. This way the user gets to continue experiencing more unique and fun content at each difficulty, and the difficulty levels are able to scale smoothly when the user becomes good enough to beat the old difficulty well enough. You could also measure it in other metrics- eg, items collected, sentries defeated.
Of course, all the game design info I dropped in my comment above still holds and I recommend you follow it when designing (with the exception of maybe practice mode) your map. If you have any further information about your map concept, you should send it so we can provide you more detailed information on how to make this system.
While I do understand that every mistake should be because of the player from a theoretical gameplay standpoint, it might not always be the best idea. Think of games like Fruit Ninja (I actually earned this from a video that a Fruit Ninja dev made) they decided to code that the “black kaboom x sphere” should hide behind some fruits so it doesn’t feel like it’s the player’s fault all the time. You don’t want the player to be down on themselves and quit the game. However, you also don’t want it to feel like the game is the reason for the player’s mistakes because that’ll eventually lead the player to have an unenjoyable experience. Just like dynamic difficulty, it’s hard to define that perfect balance.
With Fruit Ninja, the game quickly establishes that it’s your goal to make sure you don’t hit the bombs- the bombs are clearly labeled black with big X’s on them. The issue would arise if it was only a subtle marker. When you slice a bomb, normally you think “Ugh, why didn’t I see that”. If the bomb markers were subtle, then you would think “Bro that was NOT a bomb what the heck”. That’s the difference there. It’s not necessarily about gameplay being straightforward, it’s about the gameplay being fair.
