Whenever you spend too much a great deal of time working on something, then release it to the world to play with, there is no small chance that someone will find something they really don’t like about it. This will usually not be a pleasant experience for anyone involved, but especially not you. How you deal with this will determine whether you’re cut out for this business or not.

I want to focus on the video in this post. It’s from TheSacredLobo’s Let’s Play of Whisper version 1.2. In it, he faces enemies that have become much more difficulty for reasons that are not clear. Despite fighting just as he did to get to that point, he’s unable to take them. Obviously, this becomes very frustrating. The video is an honest reaction to his game experience and is, for the developer (me), an unmitigated disaster. The problems he’s complaining about are real. They are my fault. I created a terribly frustrating experience.

So what went wrong?

As usual, there’s no single answer to that. If you are ever in this situation, the first step is to create a list of answers to that problem. Here’s mine.

1 - The difficulty scaling method has inaccurately gauged the player’s strength.
2 - The player is not making use of most of the power they have available to them.
3 - The player’s response to difficulty (power leveling) has made the game harder (due to difficulty scaling) instead of easier.
4 - The difficulty is just too damn high.

The next step is to determine the root issue behind these problems and then determine what you can do about it, if anything.

Problems 1 and 3
The problem here is with the difficulty scaling system I introduced in version 1.1 or 1.2. It used several inputs, including player level, to determine the power of enemy zoids. I tested it in several scenarios, but I made the assumption that if players had reached a certain level then they were exhibiting certain behaviors. I did not track the actual behaviors. As a result, if a player engaged in Power Leveling, they could trick the scaling mechanism into thinking they were super strong, even if they didn’t have access to or the desire to make use of non-leveling methods of increasing strength.

This resulted in players who Power Leveled facing much stronger enemies without the skills, behaviors and such that would make those enemies a plausible fight. Instead of keeping the game interesting for power levelers, the system punished players for trying to increase their strength relative to their enemies in a way that came naturally to them.

That’s not what I was hoping for.

So I’ve changed the system to track behaviors that indicate a readiness for tougher enemies and all but removed the influence of power leveling. Now, players can go all out and still face fun challenges, or they can stick strictly to power leveling without being whacked in the face with undue difficulty.

Problem 2
Often when a player isn’t using the game’s mechanics effectively, it is because the developer did a poor job of getting the necessary knowledge across.
There are optional things that the player may or may not care about, but if there are mechanics that must be mastered just to finish the game, then they must be taught. An example of something optional is Pana’s Enlighten prayer. You can beat the game without ever using it–but having it as an option makes various different builds viable and gives you another tool for getting out of tight spots. On the other hand, Pana’s Indict prayer is nearly non-negotiable. While you can theoretically beat chapter 1 without it, you will suffer much more than necessary. Thus, it is imperative that I place greater emphasis on encouraging the player to use Indict than I do with Enlighten.
This is especially important because it would be very difficult to beat chapter 2 without using Indict. I would be setting players up for failure if I let them finish all of chapter 1 without using it, then designed the second chapter to almost require it.
This is trickier to solve, but I’ve started by setting up some in-character encouragement to break out the buffs. I now track how buffs are being used and use various characters to remind the player they exist in case their usage is dangerously low. It may or may not work…but there’s even more such things built into chapter 2 in case the player struggles there. What I want to avoid is setting up more tutorials or otherwise forcing the player to using buffs against their will.

Problem 4
This problem is simple. Sometimes, you just mess up the numbers. Maybe this enemy doesn’t need to hit quite so hard…and maybe that one doesn’t have to soak up quite as much damage.
Of course, you have to be careful not to nerf everything in response to a single source of feedback, but taking a look at what you want the enemies to feel like is pretty safe.
In this case, I had buffed the enemies around the Core Coating Stones too much at some difficulty tiers. Their strength all but assumed that the player would not only be using Indict liberally, but that they had a deep understanding of the game system and could make near-optimal decisions every time. This is not a good difficulty level for a common encounter–it’s dicey for a non-optional boss, even. As a result, I nerfed the enemies back into their specialty roles–they had expanded to being too good at too many things.

P.S. Someone who reads this blog (or the tumblr version?) saw the video a day before me and made some of these same points in a comment. Good job Lyn–you may be better at this than I am xD

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Update: I’ve already finished testing the first chapter for terrible, no-good bugs. I’m working on the second chapter and polishing things here and there. Provided no awful, soul-crushing bugs pop up, I should be able to release the game by Thursday, August 30.