Continue Your Game: The Jam - Devlog #6: A Knight in Shining Armor

This is going to be a shorter one, but I want to talk a little bit about game difficulty. Personally, I think that my game is way too easy. I can get through what I have essentially on a no hit run, so imagine my surprise when I am always getting feedback that my game is "the dark souls of game jam games". The current version is essentially easy mode. My original version had a max health of 10 HP and your max special/stamina only 10 SP (two spin attacks and you recharge from 2). This version has 15 HP and 12 SP (3 consecutive spin attacks), plus a number of little changes to make enemy hit boxes bigger and things like that.

I think that there's a lot of ways to make a game more difficult, but what I was doing originally was too punishing of mistakes. I can't expect players to know the exact size of every hitbox like I do and every enemy behavior (such as they are) intuitively, so they need to, at least at the beginning, be given enough leniency to learn those sorts of things without having to start from game over. I think that the current difficulty, which I affectionately call "wife mode", strikes the right balance of having a nintendo-like difficulty while not being brutal. Maybe I'll add a hard mode later.

I also think that difficulty can't be a question of you have less HP = harder and you have more HP = easier. (*cough* The Elder scrolls *cough*). So, where does difficulty come from? I think there's no one true answer, but I personally want it to be based on knowledge of the game. I'm specifically thinking of Doom 2, where if you know the location of the secrets the game becomes much, much easier. But, the buffs from secrets can't permanent either because that would just break the game.

So, I present to you the only thing I managed to do in my game this week: ARMOR!!!!!

This will be available through secrets (I'm not going to tell you where) and from the soon to be built In-game shop at a somewhat steep price. Armor health is 50% of your max health and takes damage for you until it's depleted. I think that it looks sick, and I want to make it so you can change the feather color at least, and it strikes the right balance of giving knowledgable or clever players a leg up in the next area.

That's all I've got. Now if you'll excuse me, the Dodgers are losing.

Peace.