I made the IGF deadline! I worked a ton of hours this week, but I got all the audio problems solved, and all audio reasonably balanced. If you’re wondering what kind of issues might crop up with audio, some examples are:
- Sounds not playing if they were exactly vertically aligned with the camera
- Looping sounds continuing to play even after the boss/enemy/etc was dead
- Ducking being completely broken / not working
…et cetera! I’ll probably need to do one more pass to make sure all sounds are playing at good volumes, but in general, it’s all peachy.
Tuning Difficulty
I had some time left over before the submission deadline, so I did a full pass of the game’s difficulty, too! For a while I’ve worried the game was fun, but kind of unengaging — besides not having any audio, I think a lack of difficulty was to blame. I went through the game on Very Hard, level by level, boss by boss, and tuned everything way up!
Now, I recognize that I’m really good at Bleed 2. What feels too easy to me is probably way too hard for many others. With that in mind, I didn’t even touch the Easy or Normal difficulties for 90% of these changes — I tuned Very Hard to what I felt was a real good (but fair) challenge, and then changed Hard to make a smoother transition across difficulties. So in the highly accurate graph below, the red line is what the progression was like before, compared to the yellow progression now.
It also got me thinking about how I tune difficulty, and I think I rely on three methods: raw numbers, fairness, and what I want as a player.
Raw Numbers
Here’s an example of the stats that drive bosses/enemies/etc in Bleed 2 — how much time they take to telegraph their attacks, how fast the attacks move, how often they shoot bullets, etc etc etc. When I set the numbers, especially initially, one easy and “scientific” way to come up with values is to think of the raw capabilities of most humans. For example, a quick Google search says that the average human has a reaction time of 250 milliseconds. Alternatively, I took tests like this one to measure my own reaction time (I got an average of 270, below Google’s average human I guess!)
Actually using these values is silly in my opinion — recognizing and responding to threats in-game is more complicated than a reaction test, and playing with 250ms of warning on an attack feels really unfair. I personally push the numbers up to 350-400ms for Very Hard, but it’s nice to have that general range as a cutoff point. Similarly, I have ranges I stay within for the speed of bullets, enemy reaction time, and so on.
Fairness
Raw data is nice, but you have to factor in what’s actually happening in the game. For example, in a boss fight like Red (above), the screen is being filled with enemies and your attention is being drawn all over the place. Is it fair to expect a player to perform the same here, compared to when the boss is the sole focus of their attention? I don’t believe so. It doesn’t mean I’m going to give a TON more warning time on Red’s shots, for example (at least not on Very Hard!) but the numbers are definitely a bit more generous (500ms absolute minimum) and the bullet moves slower than a typical Very Hard bullet.
I try to keep in mind that it goes the other way, too! Even after a boss does their wind-up “I’m-going-to-attack-you-now” animation, they still have to move towards you (for example), and that takes time too — sometimes the numbers can seem unfair, while the game plays just fine.
What I Want As A Player
Finally, what I want to experience as a player beats everything else. This Segment Slider attack looks neat, for example, but when I actually play it I end up feeling like “…oh, that’s it?” I want more bullets, I want the attack to last longer! I want it to be like this big wave crashing against me! So regardless of what the numbers say, I always go back and change it if it doesn’t feel fun or “right” to me.
I’m not sure how easy the difference is to tell between the two gifs, but they’re there! Bullets come out 1.5x-2x more frequently, and the attack lasts close to twice as long. It just feels like a more substantial attack to me that way! There are more concrete examples but they’re all from bosses I haven’t shown yet soooooo I hope this will do. :D
…of course, this is all tuning the difficulty to the hardest level. For the easier difficulties, I go way in the opposite direction as a starting point (duh). From then on, the only true test of whether it’s good or not is watching other people play (which PAX was great for!) I’ve also been referring to the original Bleed’s Easy mode numbers, but I’m looking forward to getting some in-person playtesting of the entire game done soon, to see how it’s all turned out. Things are never as easy as I think I’ve made them!!