Yeah boiiiii! One boss left to go and I’m pumped as hell – with any luck, I’ll finish it by the end of next week. In the meantime, here’s a little ditty about a controversial feature – dynamic difficulty! Basically, if you die a whole bunch, the game starts taking it easy on you, until you can hopefully proceed. I should clarify that it won’t be in Bleed 2, but I thought I’d talk about it anyways – mainly how it can be achieved, and why I’m against its inclusion (in my game, at least.)

Before I get into whether it’s good or bad for my game, here’s how I’ve set up my code to support it. For every boss (and enemy, and hazard, and so on) I’ve created tables of data for all their stats (health, move speed, etc etc etc.) Every stat gets multiple entries – one for each difficulty level.

Not only does it let me view the data in an understandable way, it allows for easy gradial difficulty! Normally, if I want a boss’ health, I’d say “give me the ‘health’ number for the current difficulty level.” If the player is dying a lot, it’s a simple matter of bending the number down towards the next-highest difficulty – something like “give me the ‘health’ number a certain percent between the current difficulty level, and the one below it.” At first it wouldn’t bend at all, but after a few deaths it’d start gradually going down, capping somewhere around 50% towards the previous difficulty (any farther and you may as well just play the lower setting.) You can see I’ve created a new difficulty, “Too Easy”, just so the Easy difficulty has something to bend down towards.

I think the reason I coded even the potential for this is because ultimately, I want people to enjoy playing Bleed 2. I know how crushing a series of defeats can be to some, and I want to encourage players to keep trying and reward their perseverance. I want them to have fun! At the time, it also seemed like a clever little addition, something to take the game to the next level and make it a slick, professional package.

The thing is, now that I’ve thought about it, the spirit of Bleed is in being challenged and improving your skills, hopefully resulting in you feeling like a badass. Fudging the numbers and bending the difficulty down just seems like a cheap substitute for that feeling – I’d rather player skill bend up, which I think results in a more pure rush, even if only subconsciously.

Besides, I already have the easier difficulties to accommodate new players! The original Bleed’s easy mode was tuned until my mom could beat the first level, and she barely knows how to hold a controller. I wouldn’t be comfortable lowering it farther than that — if she can do it, so can you!

The good news is that I might be able to use this feature for the opposite effect, to increase the difficulty! Not as a part of natural gameplay, but there could be a special mode or option or mutator or something, to make the game harder as you go – especially if I ever realize Endless Mode one day. So thinking about how to implement it might not have been a total waste!

Until then, I’m grinding away trying to finish this last boss. It’ll be a wonderful milestone to reach, and I hope to report doing so next week! Take care!