It’s very likely that you or someone you know has been there: Your last save or checkpoint was a half hour ago. You’re deeper in the dungeon than you’ve ever been before. You’re low on health and supplies. It’s tense and dangerous and all you want is to find the place where you can save your progress so you can breathe. And then it happens - you die. Maybe it was a heroic last stand or maybe you got blind-sided by a slime. It doesn’t matter, it’s all gone. You’re left frustrated and exhausted from the experience. The last thing you want is to do all that again, so you turn off the game.
Player Time is Precious#
As designers we must be very intentional with the experience we are creating, have a deep understanding of how it will impact a player, and whether or how long it will take to push them out of the experience. Every decision we make needs to be weighed against how we expect players will spend their time.
In a world where a potential player has more choice than ever on how to spend their time, when anyone chooses to play your game it’s a commitment you should honour. That doesn’t mean giving them exactly what they want, but you should make sure the time they spend with your game leaves them feeling rewarded, rather than frustrated.
Risk vs Reward or Intentional Abuse#
The recent conversation about the difficulty in Silksong has re-ignited the discourse around how much is too much, what’s fair and what makes for a meaningful, rewarding experience. Most of the players I know who have finished, or even come close to finishing, Silksong have done so out of spite and never intend to return to the game due to its elevated, often unfair feeling difficulty.
What constitutes reasonable risk vs reward and where does it begin to abuse the player? Generally speaking, I draw the line based on what mechanics the game has taught the player, how far through the experience they are and whether or not something can reasonably be considered fair. And it’s the last part that is often the crux of the matter.
As designers we like to surprise players from time to time or to put a new twist on a situation or mechanic. This is generally a good practice, but it can be taken too far. If you teach a player that a mechanic will give them health and then make them rely on that, you create a sense of safety when they interact with that mechanic. If suddenly that mechanic drains their health instead, it can’t reasonably be said that it’s a fair surprise given that in all other situations or occurrences so far, it’s never done that.
Digging a bit deeper we need to unpack why that mechanic might change or be subverted. What is it trying to teach the player and is it something players will need to know from now on? If so then it could reasonably be said to be fair given the player is now armed with that knowledge - though intentionally killing the player in an otherwise unavoidable way is dirty pool. If, on the other hand, it doesn’t teach the player something meaningful about the game and is instead used simply to laugh at the player’s misfortune, then it becomes an abuse of their trust. Player’s have a very limited tolerance for that and will remember each incident vividly.
Navigation & Backtracking#
Another area to consider is about the time and effort required to navigate the game world and whether or not backtracking - having to retrace your steps back to a previous point in order to progress - is necessary.
Often in games that require the player to explore the world as a progression mechanic, there will be places players reach that are dead ends or are blocked until later in the experience. Requiring a story beat, required pre-condition or a new item or ability to pass the block, will require the player to return at a later time.
Understanding and carefully balancing how long these paths are, the challenges encountered on them and how far the player must traverse to reach them when they need to return, are all important considerations. Following on from that, consider how much you tell your players in the game’s UI to support their traversal. For instance, do you highlight doors with different colours to indicate how they’re opened? That provides an at-a-glance tool for players who can then make a plan for their next destination, rather than roaming around randomly or being forced to try to remember where they saw that colour door before.
Running the Gauntlet#
It’s not uncommon in games to have locked arenas; locations where players are constrained and cannot leave until they’ve overcome a specific challenge - usually a combat or survival challenge.
These demand that players use their tools to overcome the challenge at hand before they can proceed. This is a hard gate - if you can’t pass the challenge, you can’t proceed in the game, period (as opposed to a soft gate which you can fail or partially succeed at and still progress). Compounding this is the difficulty of the challenge - too easy and it feels like a waste of time, but too difficult and the player is now stuck.
Consider mid-challenge checkpoints. In situations where you use waves of challenges, allowing players to attempt the next challenge after overcoming the previous one without having to redo parts of the game they’ve proven themselves already capable of, shows that you respect their time and effort.
Instead of making a player face 20 waves of enemies before their progress can be saved or checkpointed, break that down into meaningful challenges instead of just a bulk number.
Have Reasonable Expectations#
In all cases a reasonable threshold of player expectations needs to be established, taking into account all of the variables the player could interact with at this stage in the game.
Do they have health recovery items? Limited ammunition? How will these factors affect the experience if the player has or does not have these when they enter the arena? What happens if they fail - do you replenish any limited use items or supplies they expended?
Spoilers, but the answer to that last question is almost always yes; if they couldn’t pass the challenge when they had those available how can they possibly pass it without them?
Be Generous#
Always err on the side of generosity with your players. If you as the designer feel something is too easy then it’s still too hard. The countless hours of development time you’ve put in builds inherent skill and familiarity with the mechanics and gameplay that both you won’t immediately recognise in yourself but also that players won’t have.
Add more save/check points than you think are needed. Give more ammo, health and wider windows for player responses to challenges. It is better for a player to finish an easy game and have a positive experience than it is for them to abandon a hard game feeling negatively.
A potential caveat to this however is if you have major game systems that rely on putting players into a failure state. If they never reach that failure state, it can’t possibly serve its purpose. In these cases considerable playtesting and even more careful tuning are required to ensure you’re seeing those states manifest without players getting stuck in a failure spiral. Consider asking yourself if there is real value in those systems and having the player reach that failure state at all.
Opportunities for Recovery#
Just like there are hard and soft gates, there is also hard and soft failure.
Hard failure is an unrecoverable state like the spikes in Mega Man - they kill you instantly with no chance for you to correct what went wrong.
Soft failure is less severe - it’s a sub-optimal outcome but can be recovered from, like when a guard sees you and becomes altered in a stealth game. You can escape, wait for them to reset to their unaware state and try the challenge again.
Using soft failure instead of hard failure isn’t always appropriate, but it does give players more opportunities to recover and learn from mistakes, ultimately giving them a more forgiving experience.
Skippable Curtscenes#
This is another one of those things that shouldn’t need to be said, but we don’t need to watch the same cutscene again and again. If it has to play every time the player reaches a certain point, let them skip it if they want. You can’t force players to absorb or experience something they have no interest in. That will frustrate them and push them out of the game if it happens too often.
The better option is to avoid repeatedly throwing the same information at the player to begin with. If you believe that they need to be able to see it again, consider another way for them to review that same information elsewhere in-game like a quest tracker, logbook or a menu that allows them to replay specific cutscenes or audio logs.
Natural Stopping Points#
Sooner or later a player will stop playing your game. Whether it’s to play or do something else, it will happen. We also live in a world where big developers are authoring huge online experiences and demand as much engagement as possible, for as long as possible.
Even within the strictures of that environment, your game should have a natural cadence to the experience with places where players can sit back, take a breath and preserve their progress, letting them stop playing.
Building these in is important because if you begin demanding play sessions that take longer than the player has available, they simply won’t play anymore. There’s no hard and fast rule here, and the choices made will be for the specific case of your game, but knowing and respecting the fact that players have lives outside your game will mean it’s easier for them to come back to it when they can.