Difficulty in Video Games - Game Design
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 12 ก.ย. 2024
- In this video we explore how to balance difficulty in your game!
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♪ "ES_Dress Code_Black - oomiee" by Epidemic Sound
♪ "Brooklyn Flava - Mattias Andreasson" by Epidemic Sound
This is a cool format, fresh video my dudes
Ree
nice
Here comes the sh#tssssssss....
Can u work on Karlson, you need to beat Valorant
milk
Would love to hear how difficulty is handled in Multiplayer Games
matchmaking. Typically there is a hidden mmr (matchmaking ranking) at play and you are matched with players close to your ranking.
Also, games with multiple characters to choose from typically offer characters with varying degrees of difficulty to master. The balance is still there, it's just that the 'easier' to play champions have more straight forward mechanics, and as such it is easier to reach a minimum degree of efficiency playing your character and even if you aren't playing too well, you can still tell that you are contributing to your team to some extend. It also allows the player to focus on and learn about the mechanics that don't directly relate to your charater specifically, maybe you are more focused on learning about the strengths and weakness of the characters you are fighting.
There are two ways to do dynamic difficulty for multiplayer games. Matchmaking ranking as @Bananenbauer123 points out and adjusting player and enemy power levels as seen in the video.
The later requires more attention to balancing as you basically have to cheat for noobs which pisses off skilled players as you are giving some players an unfair advantage when they should just "get good". But Some players will quit and never come back if the game is too difficult for them and they just die all the time.
A happy medium is to do both. All new players play against the lowest tear but with a mixture of skilled and unskilled players form that tear. If a player just demolished the competition they will move up a tear. But if the player is doing awful they remain at this tear and possibly get some buffs to help them out. This will piss fewer players off as noobs who are getting the buffs are playing against noobs and not more skilled players.
It's one of rhe aspects of my thesis, i can let you know when i end it :p
@@Yzera_ I would be very interested in reading that.
This has been very informative so far. Thank you all!
When I make games I often get a skewed perception of the difficulty because I already know what little tips and tricks to use. Recently though, I've started letting my friends playtest my games before I publish them. Letting someone else play your game for even as little as 5 minutes can be incredibly informative!
why does gmtk’s voice sound different?
Likely recording at home with different equipment
Someone r/woooshed here but I don’t know who
Haha , lol I thought the same when I saw the thumbnail.. that channel deserve mention
@@Player-kg1ds yeah I noticed immediately after posting but TH-cam wouldn't load my comment so I thought for some reason it didn't publish.
Andrew Wang sorry, needed to clear my throat
Whenever Brackeys puts a Rage Quit clip it makes me want to binge-watch the entire series, hah.
I just got Unity and am starting to learn. This channel has helped me a lot so far. Thanks!
as an aside, keep the environment in mind! my "favorite" example of this is time trials in Test drive unlimited 2 (the game I can't stop playing for some reason).
If it starts to rain while you are doing a time trial you still have to beat the AI which ran in the dry. this leads to you effectively being down 4 seconds, which in racing games is huge. because the weather is dynamic you can just keep trying at the course until it eventually dries up. but you can't quit the race to do that. so your stuck retrying over, and over again.
the point is, make sure if you have a changing environment, that you account for it in difficulty.
I have been watching this Chanel since 2016 and im happy to see it reaching 1 milion. Congradulations keep up with good videos.
You should make more videos like this. I think it came out really well and it's fun to learn about some of thought processes in making games. Keep up the good work. Stay healthy.
3:00 One thing is for the game to follow its own rules, and not exempt itself from its own laws. A concept dev's often forget. I.e. you're a wizard in a game, you have a fire spell. Fire can't breach a stone wall. You fight a dragon and his fire breath clips through the wall and kills you.
Should've used footage of a journalist trying to pass tutorial in Cuphead.
Hey brackeys can you plz make a video on how to make destructible tiles
One of the most interesting examples of dynamic difficulty is int he Ratchet and Clank games. They would look at your performance in a level, then adjust the difficulty of the NEXT level - however, once you get to that level, it would be locked in. Thus you'll never have the situation where you die a bunch and then see the game throwing fewer enemies at you, and then have the negative feeling where you feel like the game is catering to you. Thus it's completely invisible but helps tweak things to each specific player.
Love this GMTK style of videos, super entertaining. Well done team Brackeys!
When Brackeys starts doing videos you'd expect on GMTK. O.o
For real. This took me by surprise. Good surprise, of course!
GMTK is add free, flow uninterrupted
this is a gmtk video practically verbatim, with ads, every topic is in the same order as the dark souls easy mode video, it's disappointing really considering there's so many more topics to do and they pick this one and make an off-brand version of another video
@@mod8077 Yeah, I normally love Brackeys but this feels pretty cheap
Nothing new.. most of his videos are just his own "take" of someone else's..still does nice work but keep in mind.
The Brackeys tutorials are always helpful, but conceptual videos like these are also super informative. If nothing else it gives you inspiration to draw from
For a second I thought this was a video from Game Maker's Toolkit XD Great video!
11:25 yes, please do a video about perceived difficulty in competitive game too :D
These videos focusing on game design are great! Keep it up!
Bonus points for that Dark Souls thumb.
I really like you are getting more into game design, it's usually a theme that most game developers ignore
Nice video buddy. Looking forward for you to make a tutorial on making photorealistic forest environment. Thanks!
I was thinking to do in my game like this, If The character dies a lot, we reduce the attack of the enemies until a especific limit number, also the game that i am develloping its called "vitala"
Great video 😄
You always post when we need it!
Can you go back to the old video format? Whenever I had a problem I went to you first because you explained them so well! Game design is made by some other people, but well teached unity mechanics not so much
Did Brackeys just get sponsored by Google to turn into GMTK??
Man quarantine is craaaaazy
The production value has leveled up! No face shown, but the animated graphics and what not was top notch. Nice!
11:29 best pun ever
Inspired by Game Makers Toolkit?
it's also cool to challenge the player in multiple ways, to keep it fresh and not have to stay on the same track, but this can also have good effects on the player's knowledge of more mechanics and you could introduce the mechanics again (a good example is Everhood, with attack deflection)
I haven't watched the entire vid so they might have said this already
thanks so much brackeys for finally making a game design theme tip video. been waiting for this for ages. :D I loving this new format too. I hope to see a video on how to increase level design please n how to get ideas from different genres.
Would like a video on vehicles, space ships, ecc... Keep up the good work man
nice intro to a basic game design concept ! :) Thanks for the reference to the DDA paper, definitely will check it out
2:14 this is true, I was just playing Half Life 1 this morning, and saw that health packs gave me less health the later I got in a game, and more difficult enemy’s appeared more frequently
비디오 게임에 있어서 난이도라는 개념이 가장 설정하기 어려운 것 같습니다. 사람들은 너무 쉬운게임에 흥미를 잃지만 너무 어려운게임에도 흥미를 잃기 마련입니다. 이러한 난이도 개념을 조절하는데에 있어서 게임디자인 개념을 적용하여 영상에서 해결하는 모습이 인상깊었습니다.
Great video! Would love to see the mentioned topic of difficulty in online multiplayer! Also, would be awesome to see a connection made with these types of "design" videos with your normal "development" videos. Theory is fun, but even more fun when you learn how to put it into practice! Keep being awesome :)
For the Competitive Multiplayer game difficulty discussion, if and (hopefully) when it's made, can we discuss a perceived difficult part of the game vs actual difficulty. I may be wording it poorly but the difference between learning combos and strings in Fighting Games or clicking heads in FPS, vs knowing footsies and punishes or map rotation/spawn trapping.
I would love to see more game design videos from you Brackeys!!
In an open world I would take what power you should be at then control the side quests in the area and then level the enemies by the equal of both
I also watched GMTK's easy mode video
The dynamic difficulty on Starcraft is good fun, watching the AI match the player and try to slightly one up them is really good fun. Also, God Hand had one of the best dynamic difficulties in any game I've played.
I feel Metal Gear solid 5 does DDA well. If you hit a lot of headshots enemies will wear helmets. If you do missions mostly at night enemies will be equipped with falshlights. I love this feature and that it makes you adapt to the enemy.
Brackeys can you please make a tutorial on how to put durability on items :^)
If u train the player u can control the skill. So u start easy and with progression increase difficulty. Players with more previous skills will go faster at the begin but once they reach their peak they will slow down. You just need to make interesting and make sure the player will understand that things are getting harder. Show a skill tree for example, so the player will know there is more to come. Or you can show an enemy using a skill that the player will only be able to get in the future, so the player will think" oooh, cool I want that". What if it is too hard for the beginners? you need to give them space to practice, not mandatory but you can show.. "hey look here you can try here", put some reward but not something too good that will make all the player obligate to go there.
It is possible to control the player skill is just really hard and a lot and lots of planning and test. And the most important... balance, balance the reward and punishment, don't make them feel terrible piece of shit when they fail but make sure they understand it is a fail, don't be so nice if they win but make sure it is worthy. Balance what are you teaching, nobody goes to math class and learn 1+1 and exponential curve in the same day, people will need time to really learn things, Just like a kid that needs to learn the ABC, the player needs to learn the ABC of your game. Maybe the players starts your game and already knows how to say "How are you?" of your game but to write a book you need to teach more.
The only thing you can't control is time, some will take more time and others less but this is fine.
But the first question you need to ask is... what kind of player am I aiming? Because it is fine to make a dark souls or make animal crossing... it is fine, we have a lot of people in the world with different tastes. But if you want get the max. as possible, it is going to be a lot of work but possible. Your choice.
Just make good games, don't give up =)
Have fun.
Super helpful video. I think theres a few factors someone should consider when using a dynamic difficulty... Deaths, time spent per level(active time only), amount of damage taken, precision of actions(like headshots versus knee shots), and amount of fails on puzzles/obstacles. I think the change should be super subtle but I dont think we should lock it into a range, instead just keep the change very subtle to the point that they shouldnt notice the change. The goal should be to retain engagement and what I like to call "prideful challenge" with rewarding moments and loot.
Awesome video as usual ! Thanks for the value you provide us for free ! 🙏🏼
2:07 missed an opportunity to call it a "flow chart" :(
Nice Video as allways !
Every time i saw a Sea of Thieves clip i smiled a bit more inside :)
I love this new style of videos, i loved this video so much, keep it going 👍🏻
The other, quite similar topic, is a difficulty in open world games. Should you adjust enemy power to the player power? If so, how? How to protect the player from wondering into going into high level zone and getting rekt? In some games, Skyrim for example, enemies "level up" at the same rate as you do. While it should be fine, there are multiple problems with that. You won't ever feel powerful. Trying a different playstyle usually requires starting a new playthrough - if you're lvl 100 and lvl 1 in archery then killing anything with a bow gonna be a nightmare.
You could do a video on this topic, wonder what your opinion is.
this video was the best birthday present yet
That's a really fresh and funny edit ! good job
Well done! A lot different than your traditional content. Keep it up!
0:21 maaan those scenes look lovely
Brackeys: But the players skill level is out of our hands.
Aim Assist: What am I a joke to you?
certainly is to my wife
That's one of the problems I find with many modern games designs and involving game trophies / achievements. Some achievements are only able to be obtained by the best of the best players. If a player walks away from a game in frustration, that will be the word that gets spread around. Designing difficulty is fine. Don't design frustration.
@@TheMeanArena I always ask myself when I'm improving or working on a new AI if I am making it more difficult, or just more tedious. Most games the difficulty options only make the game more tedious or they are just lowering the threshold of the number of mistakes that can be made. Which isn't exactly difficulty, at least in my eyes. I tend to favor things like implementing behavioral differences to distinguish hard enemies from easier ones. But difficulty is subjective at the end of the day, and that kind of approach has its own issues, such as being more demanding on the player.
That is player power :P
Really, really nice video Brackeys! Great with more theoretical content! 👍🤓
We use Firebase a lot. Works great with Unity 😋
Can't believe the Google came to you for sponsoring
You are really getting popular
One of your best videos. Great work guys!
Would love to see a video on competitive game difficulty.
Great video btw, loved it.
I literally almost died laughing at 4:45
such a nice video. love ya dude
please make a video also on model design and assets for 3d
I actually think DDA is not a good choice to implement in games. At least you should be able to turn it in and off. When playing a game i want the challenge to not get bored, if i lose i want to retry what i just failed at and not an easier version. Dark Souls is a great example for this, they don't give any choice about the difficulty and the only way to improve is to train or grind, i mainly liked the game as a challenge to beat.
Would love to see a video on how to break down game ideas. I have plenty, but get overwhelmed thinking about them and I never start.
Open world games often have a scaling level system to try and keep the enemies challenging no matter what order the player decides to engage them in. Sadly it tends to come at the cost of immersion e.g. when facing a "lvl 99 rat" and often makes enemies more bland.
you should make another / new updated how to make a game series for beginners since you original one may be out dated now
Please make that follow up video for multiplayer games.
I would also be interested specifically how to manage difficulty in a 4x game like Civilization or Stellaris. :)
Thanks for the amazing videos Brackey.
I found a different type of difficulty recently by examining yoshi games. The difficulty scales based on how you want to beat the game. If you just want to play yoshis island like a typical platformer, get from start to finish, the game has a moderate difficulty scaling. If you want to go for full completion, get everything in the level for a perfect score, the games difficulty gets ludicrous with weird difficulty spikes in even the first world. Take the recent yoshi game for example. Just playing it while not caring about collecting things, the difficulty in the game never really goes up. level 27 is almost the same difficulty as level 1. However if you are going for full completion there is strange difficulty spikes that become borderline dark souls frustrating. the 5th level has a huge spike compared to the ones that came befopre then going back to relatively easy for a few levels before repeating. In other words the difficulty scales based upon how you approach the game and how you want to beat it.
Nice have learnt a lot from this vid
Brackeys, the best channel tutoriel in TH-cam
IDK if I want googles advice, they failed their own console.
actually the players have failed Google but whatever
@@EgeDai You might be sarcastic, but they were trying to sell you the right to play their game online, not even a copy of a game, and it had to be online so they can make sure you get hooked into microtransactions easier, and it had huge latency issues.
@@mimszanadunstedt441 There was no latency when everything was setup right, and no one really acknowledged that. I was one of the first testers and I had no latency whatsoever. If you got the connection, you got what they promised.
@@EgeDai What, the 3 gb/s optical fiber connection? So the other testers all got latency because of not using that?
Can you substantiate this? You might think when millions are at stake they'd fix it, but thatd still mean the customers wouldn't nearly be high enough to justify it.
Please make a video on setting up a bot that can be friendly or our enemy and has proper shooting anims, scripts etc.
I really like the idea of allowing the player to set the starting point of the difficulty by choosing their difficulty like games have in the past. When I heard that games were dynamically changing the difficulty depending on how well the player is doing I figured this was the best option for most and would do this instead of allowing players to choose their difficulty. But then how do you make the start of the game? You have to gauge the player's skill level at the beginning. If you make it too easy, to begin with to skilled players will get bored or mad. If you make it difficult to satisfy skill players then you are making it too hard for noobs. But allowing the player to choose their difficulty at the beginning lets you know how much skill they think they have. If they choose wrong you can always shift the difficulty down or up and they won't mind as the game will naturally feel better.
I love your videos as an amateur
More video like that would be awesome
Thank u much love friend
The Art of Game Design by Jesse Schell has some very interesting in depth analysis of the Flow and the psychological reasons for it
Thank you so much for making this, really explained a lot of different things
I am a new sub just getting started with the whole game creating thing just curious.. the whole point is obviously not to make money but aside from the youtube channel itself... have you found a local studio or company to work with at any point?.. like has it come in handy monetarily?
Hey Brackeys, would love a little note telling which game is shown on screen, or the names in the description chronologically:) would be great!
I agree. Would like to know what the Souls like game that he kept showing is.
@@h8today that's the game I was curious about too!
Please more awesome game design video !
Could you please do an Active Ragdoll in 2D tutorial like the characters from Stick Fight:The Game? I can't find anything on this topic.
lol I cited the same paper in one my papers recently and here I am to see if there's something different out there done by someone
I don't know what you guys are doing but I'm burned out after forced myself to work. It's been a while without any progress now. I decided to just follow my own flow but it's hard because I used to forced myself to work since I was young so it's hard to get out of that habit. I need to do something about social expectation in my mind too because it causes a lot of anxiety. To fellow game developers please take care of your mental health too.
Great video editing!! Could you tell me where did you get these WOW models? Thanks for all these great tutorials!!
Making a challenging enemy is really easy. What you need to do is make a fair enemy
Preferably an enemy that becomes more manageable once you've analyzed its patterns, strenghts and weaknesses, so intrinsic knowledge of the game and world becomes and important weapon in the player's arsenal :)
i did a presentation at my uni just a couple months ago on exactly this its pretty interesting
i'm getting old extra credits vibes from this and i kind of wish someone would animate it all in that kind of style.
Yes I want to see a video on perceived difficulty
I loved that you used The Division as an example of not very engaging gameplay lol. I could never get into that game as the enemies were just unrealistic.
This is some nice #quarantinecontent
Brackeys, can you (please) make a tutorial video of how to use & what we can do with unity 2020.1? it's interesting!
this is actually a very good video
Brackeys is becoming a game Journalist Nice 👌👌
8:20 - Maybe I've been out of the scene for a bit, but my understanding was for Starcraft AI, the APM limit isn't so it doesn't crush humans. The limit is so that it learns to play like a human opponent.
What is the point an AI learning to abuse its high APM to challenge you? Then you learn to beat that but you suddenly aren't keeping up with other human players.
Human players have to make specific strategy choices because of their APM limitations. The AIs should be trying to emulate that.
what do you mean, learn to beat that? I suppose you mean that players might adopt ways of exploiting some of the AI's behaviour. I suppose no AI is truly perfect, but let's assume it was possible - it'd be unbeatable, because it has an infinite number of eyes and screens to observe the battlefield. No resources are ever wasted because every game tick of time is preserved by spending everything instantaneously.
And let's not even get started with unit movement. The AI would be able to move individual units around in the middle of a fight - like say moving the most injured units always into the backline so that they can continue to fire while the more healthy units take turn to tank damage.
One thing I can say is that the starcraft AI is deliberatly designed with fog of war vision. It can only tell what buildings the player constructed after it scouted and only then will in response begin building units which typically counter units coming from those buildings.
The Dota AI is very interesting, the one which beat, I mean, crushed a team of some of the most experienced dota players. It was even posting an approximate % in chat regularly evaluating it's own odds of winning.
@@wolfymoon3928 I'm pretty sure they don't limit the APM of the in game AI... It just has a string of commands to follow. I isn't an actual machine learned AI. So, maybe he is the one confusing the two types of AI.
@@Bananenbauer123 AIs with extreme APM limits will choose strategies with intense macro. This can be things like using SCVs to repair every single unit. Or keeping every zergling alive after a single hit. Learning to counter these strategies is necessary for beating an AI, but a waste of resources against a human opponent.
The general goal for AIs in rts games is to help train your players, not win tournaments. So building an AI that wins, but doesn't teach you useful tactics, is a pretty big waste of time.
The goal is to emulate a highly skilled human opponent. So before training your AI, you limit their APM so they adopt reasonable strategies.
Followed from Morocco❤❤
can you please start giving videos on unreal engine, please.
I always use the second highest difficulty setting in games that let you choose. I've found it usually offers the best balance between fun and challenge
DOOM has entered the chat.
@@geckosnest6297 Works with Doom too, I find Ultra violence to be the best difficulty to play them
@@K1LLeRc0ck- i'm too young to die
- hurt me plenty
- ultra violence
- nightmare
- ultra-nightmare.
@@geckosnest6297 Forgot about Ultra nightmare, isn't that exclusive to Doom Eternal?
@@K1LLeRc0ck nope
more shader graph tutorials please!!
Please make a video on smartphone touch gestures or swiping