Philomena Schwab: This is too hard! How to broaden your game’s target audience with smart difficulty
14This is too hard! How to broaden your game’s target audience with smart difficulty tricks
Some games do a very good job at defining their target audience. Darkest Dungeon or Dark Souls are great examples for this. You take one look at their screenshots and there is no doubt that this is a hardcore game with high difficulty. Our studio also makes hardcore games, but they have cute, colourful graphics. And so it often happens that all kinds of different players pick them up, often hoping for a relaxing experience. This puts our team in a though spot when it comes to balancing and game difficulty. Our studio is now working on its third simulation/rougelike PC game facing this challenge and we have come up with quite a few tipps and tricks to solve it. I’d love to share our learnings regarding difficulty settings, narrator-defined and adaptable difficulty with you all.
Lead-in music generated by Sonat Uzun.