Last week, I wrote about challenge in games, how games that are too easy feel awfully flavorless, and how hard it is to get it right for a range of players with a range of skill levels. Actually, it's beyond hard--it's impossible. Some people will always find your game too easy, and some will find it too hard. 

Having accepted that, the best we can do is to try to mitigate the frustration felt by players who don't start out with amazing skills. Challenge is one thing, but frustration, while it might be inevitable and not even totally undesirable at times... well, a little goes a long way. So here are a few thoughts about keeping the challenge satisfying while also keeping players from throwing their phone/laptop/controller out the window.

1. Lower the stakes.

One thing that annoyed me as a self-identified hard-ass old-school gamer in the '90s was that people (the damn kids, mostly) would complain about dying in games. Having beefed it probably thousands of times in the course of beating Super Ghouls 'N Ghosts, I found that a tough position to sympathize with. I mean, one of the central principles of a video game is that you're stepping into a virtual space--where better to take risks you wouldn't take in real life? Unlike in your day-to-day existence, experimentation is almost completely untrammeled by consequence--what a gift! It's not like when you die in Super Ghouls 'N Ghosts, Tokuro Fujiwara appears in your living room and pees on the floor. (Though after a while, you may feel that he has.) What does dying in a game really cost you?

But to be fair to the soft-bellied youth of the '90s, by the period that they were starting to complain about it, dying in games really did cost you something: time. Did it ever. Whereas taking an eagle to the face in Ninja Gaiden usually meant a matter of seconds--minutes at most--to get back to where you were, dying in The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time could mean an hour of listening to a filibustering owl, lectures from a fairy, and grand, game-interrupting announcements that you'd managed to secure another key. Perhaps because it's so annoying to die in OoT, the game is also too easy; the designers had to cap the challenge because failure was so frustrating. 

​To me, there's a clear solution: lower the stakes. Failure is a crucial part of success; without it, success is unearned and unsatisfying. So don't make like Ocarina and make failure itself almost impossible. Make failure low-cost. Restarting should be fast, and levels should be short. When you die, it should take you milliseconds to get back into the action; otherwise, you're taken out of the flow every time, and that really does cost you. Luckily, modern indie games like Spelunky and Super Meat Boy have this thoroughly figured out; they're hard as hell, but dying just makes you want to try again. (During development, Satellina had six levels per "suite"; your goal was to clear them in less than three minutes. That was fine, but when I cut it down to five levels in 2:30, it instantly felt better.)

​In Witcheye, I'm not shooting for Spelunky-level difficulty. A few savants aside, most people found Satellina pretty hard, so for a follow-up, I wanted to make something breezy and fun; still hard enough to be satisfying, but generally more of a romp than a gauntlet. (Beating the game on normal difficulty will unlock a harder mode where I'll really break out the hammer and tongs, if that's your thing.) 

The reference point I'm looking towards on this score and many others is Super Mario Bros. 3. That stone classic is actually pretty tough, but people don't seem to remember it that way; when gamers are talking over the "Nintendo-hard" games of yesteryear, it rarely comes up. Part of that is that the difficulty of SMB3 is so exquisitely tuned, but I think another big part of it has to do with tempo: SMB3's levels are generally very short, and 1UPs are abundant, so you rarely get sent back to the beginning of the world to redo parts you've already mastered. Pacing-wise, it's not so far off from Super Meat Boy. It feels very more-ish. 

​(Of course, SMB3 also just feels right in about a hundred other ways. One that I've also had in mind while designing Witcheye is just how much stuff it throws at you--so many memorable little touches in that game. More on that later.)

I'm keeping levels quite short in Witcheye, and restarting is instant; there are no lives, so you don't have to stress about your longevity. 

2) Work discreetly on the player's behalf.

I've already gone on for a bit as usual (now who's the filibustering owl?) so I'll keep the second point shorter: the player should always feel like failure was their own fault. Tie goes to the runner.

Now, this can be overdone: you don't want it to feel like the game's on autopilot (again, looking at you, '90s-'00s Zeldas); you don't want to separate them from the physical experience of being in the game. And you don't want them to feel condescended to, or you'll rob them of the satisfaction they're working sincerely to earn.

But when something's close, if you quietly break a tie on the player's behalf, they'll get the thrill of cheating death--what could be better? In Satellina, you're trying to avoid red particles and collect green particles. You'd never know this as a player, but the green particles have hitboxes that are slightly larger than the particle graphics themselves. The red ones? Slightly smaller. That means that maybe 5% of the time that you'd crash into a deadly red particle--or whiff on an attempt to collect a juicy green particle--I give you the benefit of the doubt. It's (hopefully) imperceptible, but it makes the game just a little bit kinder, without lowering the perceived challenge, since the two kinds of particles are still very much there, very much tangible, and very much something you need to stay spatially aware of. Witcheye gets up to some of the same tricks; I'll explore them in more detail in a later post about boss design. 

​Thanks for reading!

I've never worked in a restaurant, but I can guess a question that no waiter wants to hear: "How spicy is it?" Um... well... medium? Everyone's different. If you eat spicy food regularly, you develop more of a tolerance for it, and there are apparently genetic factors in play too. So neither the waiter nor the diner are in a good position to answer that question.

Likewise, try asking a game developer, "Is it hard?" The problem is that I don't know how much time you've spent with games, how coordinated you were to begin with, or how much of a tolerance you have for frustration. For some people, a super-punishing game is like the endorphin rush of chomping down on a habanero. For others, it's more like the screaming pain of, uh, chomping down on a habanero. 

I grew up in an era where the content of games itself was often more challenge than anything else. Coming out of a competitive arcade culture, players in the '80s were used to games that pushed back. But moreover, developers with limited resources could deliver a more substantial experience by fighting your every move tooth and nail. Once you know how to do it, you can beat the original Ninja Gaiden and Castlevania in 20 minutes each, but getting to that point could take months or years. I will never forget the night in ninth grade that Mike Brownell and I committed to beating Ninja Gaiden, consumed a grocery bag full of Nescafe and Pop Tarts, and hurled ourselves at Level 6-2 until 4 AM, finally giving up almost in tears. (The internet was a little slip of a thing back then, so we didn't know that it was one of the most notorious levels in game history.) Since then, of course, the business of games has grown a lot, so you can pile a lot more non-challenge-based stuff into a game and not have the challenge need to carry so much weight.

There's all kinds of macho posturing now from old-school types about how games today are too easy... and I'm completely on board with it. No, I kid--I find "git gud" machismo as off-putting as all the other kinds. But I do feel that when a game doesn't have enough challenge, it kind of slips through your fingers. The lows may be higher (you don't get as frustrated), but the highs are lower (it's not very gratifying to win if you didn't have to do anything), and that's not very exciting. It kind of feels like chewing your bovine way through a wad of flavorless gruel. 

So I think games need a certain degree of resistance. At the same time, I've never had any interest in making games that are just punitive or sadistic--the point is still to have fun! It's just that different people have different ideas of fun, and that's tricky. 

​The best solution is, of course, to have people test it. And to extend the metaphor, there's a hand-pulled noodle restaurant here in New York that answers the "how spicy is it" question exactly that way: they've got a chart on the menu that tells you what percentage of people order which level of spiciness, so if you have a sense of where you are in the general population as far as spice tolerance, you can guess at what's right for you.

When you're developing a game, you'll play it to the point of mastery and then some, and you'll completely lose your reference point for what others will find difficult. Nothing is more illuminating than watching someone play your game for the first time. They will find amazing new kinds of incompetence that you never even thought were possible, and it will blow your mind; then you can adjust accordingly.

​But while you can make those adjustments, a game will always be too hard for some and too easy for others. When I released Satellina, half of the players I heard from told me it was impossible, and the other half said they beat it in half an hour--and why was it so short?

​To me, the best you can do is keep the challenge high (and satisfying) while trying to mitigate the frustration. Aren't those two things inextricably coupled? Well, coupled, yes, but inextricably, no. Maybe the metaphor is, you can serve some goddamn spicy food, as long as you put a nice glass of coconut milk next to the plate. (OK, I'll stop.) I'll be back with a few thoughts on how to do that next week. Thanks for reading!

In a way, the idea of a bunch of cute little monsters is Witcheye's whole reason for being. I've had the above page from the Japanese Kid Icarus manual hanging in my apartment hallway for years, and I love it. Among the many things I loved about poring over game manuals back in the day was miniature menageries like this. There's something so appealing about these little collections — a big part of the attraction of later series like Pokemon, I think. (They also make me think of notebook pages from 18th-19th century biologists, always cool to look at.) Having made a game that was all celestial abstraction, I was excited to make one with more goofy personality.

The goal for this game was to come up with a bunch of enemies who had unique behaviors & vulnerabilities, each a kind of little puzzle as to how you deal with them. Yes, there are recurring enemy types — when you learn to handle one type, you may meet a trickier version of it a couple levels later. (In other words, this is a video game.) But I'm really trying to make each type distinct, so you always feel like you're seeing something new.

From a gameplay point of view, designing enemies for this game has been an interesting challenge. Since the eye itself is both player and weapon, I can't just have generic grunts who try to bump into you. That affected their visual designs too — I needed to clearly telegraph what was dangerous and what was vulnerable. Then of course I try to squeeze in some personality... not always easy to do all that in 16x16 pixels!

Something that always makes me laugh in The Great Gatsby for NES is the look on the waiters' faces when you clobber them (for no reason!) Maybe there's something wrong with me... but there's lots of that kind of slapstick with the monsters in Witcheye.

Personality is also an interesting question as part of a dialogue with gameplay. These little leaf guys (I call them Leaf Meelone, obviously) struck me as basically amiable little doofuses, who originally didn't really do much. They just shuffled around, very occasionally spitting a languid projectile in your general direction. The problem was, they weren't that exciting to fight, so I ended up raising their firing rate, making them more aggressive. But when I did it, part of me thought, "...but they wouldn't act like that!" 

Counting all the variations of each enemy, there are currently about 80 enemies and bosses designed for this game, with hopefully 100+ in the final version. As benchmarks, I used Super Mario Bros. 3, which has around 60, and Mega Man 2, which has around 35. But both those games have a range of other challenges (platforming, etc) that Witcheye doesn't, so I thought I'd aim high in this department. Please excuse the hubris! 

Hi! I'm midway through developing my third commercial game, Witcheye, and I'm going to share a few thoughts on it here.

This game was meant to be a kind of stopgap step forward between developing Satellina (my first game, explicitly conceived as the simplest concept I thought I could squeeze some real gameplay out of and actually finish and get released) and a more ambitious mobile-game concept I was chewing over.

Well, as you might've predicted, this stopgap project took on a life of its own, and has turned into a massive endeavor itself--so much so that I ended up inserting another stopgap game, Satellina Zero, within the development of my supposed stopgap game. (Satellina Zero I actually did manage to squeeze out in six months or so, so maybe I'm getting better at estimating these things.) (Probably not.)

At its core, Witcheye DID have a simple concept: basically, what if you were playing Breakout, but could control the ball directly? All you need to do is swipe in the direction you want to go! This appealed to me because you could only really do it on a touchscreen; I could make a big, colorful, old-school adventure without relying on the clunky virtual controls you see in a lot of mobile games. When I'm making a mobile game, I want to use the actual innate qualities of the device, instead of trying to cram a different control paradigm onto an object that isn't really built for it.

Once I had that in mind, I saw two directions I could take it. One was a kind of score-attack game, where you try to control your swipes and rebounds to clear the screen of bricks or something like them, with various complications and bonuses and risks. The other was, well, a big old-school adventure, with a bunch of colorful worlds to explore and enemies to fight. In other words, it basically came down to a split between focusing on mechanics, and focusing on content. 

Perhaps you will detect a certain wistfulness in my tone as I tell you that I decided to focus on content. Ultimately, what I love about games tends to be exploring a space, seeing neat stuff, overcoming tough challenges, so those are the things I chose to pursue. But the more mechanical approach intrigues me too--and might have been less work!--so if this one doesn't kill me, maybe that'll be the next one!

So, a cautionary tale: if you're a solo developer, trying to make a game where the appeal is that it's bursting with content is maybe not the best idea. But I can't exactly say I regret it. While I've got a long way to go here, it still brings me a lot of pleasure to make a new enemy or background or secret. I hope it'll be as fun for you to discover them as it was for me to come up with them. 

​Thanks for reading--more to come!