Week 11: Every boss is easy for somebody

Difficulty is not one number. The same first boss lets 50 runs in 51 past, or 10 in 51, depending on who is holding the controls.

18 May 2027

Is it me or is it the game? That depends on the player. At a 200 ms reaction time, 46 of 51 runs reach the first boss and 18 outlast its clock; whether to lose that player is the designer's call.

Open the slides

“Is the first boss too hard?” has no answer. “For whom?” does.

The claim#

A game does not have a difficulty. It has a different difficulty for every player who picks it up, and a balance decision is a decision about which of those players you are willing to lose.

The same game, six players#

Ordinary card choices, 51 runs each. Only the reaction time changes. “Get past” means still alive when that boss’s clock runs out.

Read across a row and you get one player’s way through the game. Read down a column and you get what a gate does to a crowd. The first boss lets through 50 of the fastest player’s runs and 10 of the slowest one’s. For the 200 ms player, 33 runs out of 51 are over by the time its clock runs out, 66 s in: two thirds of that audience never reaches the second boss.

Whether that is right depends on who the game is for. It is a number now, so it can be argued about.

Reading for weeks 11 and 12#

Shaghayegh Roohi and colleagues, Predicting Game Difficulty and Churn Without Players (CHI PLAY, 2020).

They predict which levels of a shipped mobile game lose players, using simulated players and a model of a population with different skill and patience. It is this week’s table at the scale of a real studio’s game.

What you leave with#

Pass rates at both bosses for three players of your own, and one sentence saying which of the three the specimen is currently built for.