Game Design: The Purpose of Difficulty
Added 2017-05-08 07:08:07 +0000 UTCSince the very first version of Lab Rats there's been talk about it's difficulty. I'll admit, v0.1 was a touch hard, since there was literally no way to build up a high enough influence score to reach the highest serum levels (v0.1 had something like 2 or 3 major scenes for each girl, and each major scene could only be done once!). Now that the game is in a decently well developed state it's about time we take a look at the difficulty of the game and figure out what needs to be done. Before we can do that, we should see what purpose difficulty serves in game design.
The difficulty of a game serves two purposes. First, it encourages engagement and poses a challenge. Dark Souls is the perfect example of this, it's a painfully difficult game, and because of that beating it feels like it has value. This can be undermined when you're defeated because of something out of your control or something that was poorly presented. Dark Souls feels like an amazingly fun, challenging game; until someone stabs you through a wall and knocks you off an edge. Then it feels like bullshit, because the game cheated to beat you.
Second, difficulty serves to change the pace of the game. In a real time strategy game a mission might be difficult because resources are limited. With limited resources, the player has to make slow, careful decisions to make the best use of them. StarCraft is a good example of this. Different levels have different amounts of resources, and can produce very different experiences even though the core mechanics of the game are the same. A map that provides plenty of easily defended resources encourages you to attack often, trading those resources for units. With fewer resources you're encourages to buy upgrades, making the most of the units you're able to build.
So where does that leave Lab Rats? We want to try and set it at a difficulty that achieves both of the above goals: It feels satisfying to complete, and sets an appropriate pace for the game. Lets start by looking at our first goal, making it satisfying to complete successfully. To do this we'll want to make sure that the gameplay throughout the game appears fair, which is achieved by making as much information available to the player as possible, and presenting it in the most easily absorbed way. This will require tweaks and additions to the UI as we go forward, but shouldn't require any special consideration beyond that.
Second, we want the difficulty to set a pace through the game that is fun. Before we can do that, we need to figure out what kind of pace seems like it will be the most enjoyable for the player. I'm going to make the following assertions about a play through of an ideal version of lab rats.
1) It is possible to "fail" and receive none of the good endings if you aren't trying. Just clicking randomly through the game should not grant success.
2) A player who is engaged by the game and attempting to make well informed decisions should be able to get one girl to 100 influence or higher by focusing on them without any knowledge of the game or how it's structured. You should be able to "win" the game on your first play through if you try.
3) A new player shouldn't be able to get a perfect (100+ with all girls) ending on their first attempt at the game. A perfect ending should require planning and forethought, with some amount of experience in the game already.
4) There are multiple strategies that are viable in the game. They may not all be equally good, but they can all result in a "win" of some sort and are one is not immediately superior to another.
5) New content is presented to the player at a comfortable pace without "grinding". I've touched on avoiding that before here: https://www.patreon.com/posts/game-design-cost-7856670
So that's our goal. An ideal version of lab rats should satisfy all those criteria above. With that in mind we can start to look at the details: the influence and resistance values, the number of scenes that we want to have, ect. I'll put up another post in a few days and we'll start dealing with some solid numbers if we can.
In other news, writing for v0.7 continues to chug along. Two of the hub scenes have been written up, and the third is under way. I'm also sketching out the systems that will be added in v0.8 (the public/private) update and seeing how it will affect the current design of the game.
Comments
That's a solid idea, I'll see if I can find some time and make that happen.
Vren
2017-05-12 17:34:01 +0000 UTCIt's absolutely more enjoyable to overcome difficulty to get to the goal. But it's also very frustrating to miss out on content, which is very easy to do with the combination of random events and a time limit. A suggestion: How about you have a special play mode, unlocked either by winning the game or by patronage, that allows you to have more time? It would be rather cool for the reward of a successful, well-executed playthrough to be the ability to go through the game at a relaxed pace and explore all the avenues you might have missed while pursuing efficiency.
Dubsington
2017-05-11 01:00:17 +0000 UTCI agree that adding arbitrary difficulty to the game serves no good purpose and should be avoided. One of the central themes of Lab Rats is corruption of the girls though, and the time and effort it takes to achieve that is critical to setting the pace of the game. If it's too easy to corrupt a girl, there's no sense of progression with them. Too hard and the reward doesn't feel worth it.
Vren
2017-05-10 04:59:00 +0000 UTCYep, the plan is to add a few new pages that store important information, and warn the player when they're taking an action that doesn't seem like a good idea (Like attempting a major scene when the girl has resistance > 60 or something like that).
Vren
2017-05-10 04:53:18 +0000 UTCOr just do away with the limit entirely. People who think they should have to endure a challenge to fap can stop playing at whatever day they consider appropriate and the rest of us can have fun exploring all the content with out the PRNG making things hard for us.
Dubsington
2017-05-10 03:09:49 +0000 UTCI respectfully submit that comparing an ero game to a conventional RPG is invalid. Overcoming the difficulty is the primary point of Dark Souls; with Lab Rats, that is not the case. The challenge, for most players, is secondary to the erotic enjoyment of the game. Significant difficulty is an unpleasant distraction, because it forces us to play the whole game with a walkthrough in hand and constantly save the game so we can reset every time the PRNG turns against us-- otherwise we are punished by missing content.
Dubsington
2017-05-10 02:45:09 +0000 UTCI stopped following and playing that game. I can't stand playing an MC that's a cuckold wimp.
2017-05-09 23:59:15 +0000 UTCIs this post in response to Dark Silver getting beat up on his Patreon? Cause that's a bit more complex...
Blackhalo
2017-05-09 17:53:35 +0000 UTCI'm a relative newcomer to the game, and have only played 0.7.1. I completely misunderstood how the different serum types worked (I thought high resistance meant greater chance of failure in the events, and different serums gave different levels of influence on success) but just barely managed to get all girls to 100 by day 120. Of course the current resistance gain bug may have unwittingly helped me out. But I never saw several of the random events in the entire playthrough (only 1 of the 4 night events, never found the tutoring scenes or the cinema scene). Having looked at the code, my second playthrough (still unfinished) has now got all girls to 140 by day 105. But I'm still missing a lot of random scenes. It's a pity, because there seems to be a nice progression through different version s of events as infuence rises that we don't see in the playthrough. I think there's scope to raise difficulty but also to make random events more common (try significantly raising the cap on how high the probability can get, so the events will happen eventually, perhaps). Hub events may make resistance reduction easier if all the random minor scenes happen early on when there's not much resistance to reduce. You have several values you can fine-tune (resistance and influence gain, red and purple special effects, time to the end of the game). Maybe you could even have multiple difficulty settings set in a menu when you start a new game? (Standard, Easy, Challenging?)
Hollow49
2017-05-08 23:13:42 +0000 UTCfully agree with you the game is supposed to be fun with minor challenge and difficulty. I do think that if you do really well that aside from just the ending you get special scenes
Jonathan Heard
2017-05-08 22:03:23 +0000 UTCHonestly, I don't see what's the issue some of these commenters have with the difficulty. I managed 100+ on two at first play, and 120+ on everyone in second play. It took me until the second time before I fully understood the mechanics. But it's not a hard game, and that's a good thing! I am slightly undecided about the RNG aspect. I think it might be worthwhile to tweak some events to happen always the first time to help out to people understand some things are possible. Furthermore, you should make it OBVIOUS on the screen when someone's resistance goes down more than the daily amount. It took me embarrassingly long until I realized that the spontaneous sexy events bring down the resistance of the girls... One point that you didn't mention in your otherwise well thought out thoughts on difficulty: In an Adult game, the Adult material should NOT be hard to get, nor it should be something you receive when you fail (i.e. monster girl fights where you get sex scenes only when you screw up). There should be special sexytimes material you get when you do well; but in general it should not be hard to get erotic content. Otherwise you might as well make it into a "normal" game and leave the erotic material away. While gameplay is needed (to some extent) in adult games, it should not be the #1 focus of the game. Unless you're doing something like huniepop where it's basically a game with extra sexy pics.
stratum
2017-05-08 18:21:29 +0000 UTCYour description of difficulty as a game mechanic couldnt be described better - buuuut: In Lab Rats there is too much pure randomness to be compared to something like Dark Souls. If there would be more direct relation between player effort and those events i would rest my case immediately. Let me give you a single example: When you get your paycheck you get the option to 'buy' special treatments from your mom. But those dont reflect at all how far you have influenced her so far. Prices and options stay the same thus being totally unrelated. Those where things where 'difficulty' would have been nice to be a mechanic to actually provide the 'thinking' player with a real reward
2017-05-08 18:14:34 +0000 UTCI've had fun playing without cheats a couple of times. It is a bit of a grind though.
Blackhalo
2017-05-08 15:21:42 +0000 UTCHaha, this is the Dark Souls of hentai games. That's fantastic. The game over screen should say "Your Erection Died" I gave up on playing normally a while ago but still enjoy playing with unlimited resources, so perhaps consider an easy mode? Perhaps an ending that can only be reached by cheating or playing on easy, like when red serums consumed = x, you get the sex drone ending. Just as a little easter egg. :)
onen
2017-05-08 11:48:20 +0000 UTCYou are doing great! Playing at the height! Design, style of play, script and so on. Everything cool! \ (•◡•) /
SexBook _____ ADULT PHOTO AND VIDEO SIGNATURES
2017-05-08 10:19:32 +0000 UTCReading this I feel almost bad that I changed the script to make it easier for me. I increased the resistance drop per day and made it easier to acquire serums. I think there is a very fine line between too easy and too hard and I've seen both in adult games like this one. Despite cheating I think you've struck a very good balance with this game and it's great to see how much thought you put into it. That's probably the reason why this game stands above so many other games. Keep up the good work :)
Viv
2017-05-08 09:08:31 +0000 UTCInteresting thoughts, as usual. For my own, I think red and purple serums should be more involved in game difficulty concerns. For moment, you can achieve a high score using only blue serums... Thus the advantage of discovering other ones is poor. Hope this may feed your point...
2017-05-08 08:42:47 +0000 UTCFantastic read as always. I have a lot of save states (9 pages). They consist of different days of the week and different times of those days, load one, pick someplace to go and check for patterns on when certain events might play. It allows for you to plan each day, how much money to spend and if it's worth spending syrum on a certain event or saving it for another.
Rayhaku808
2017-05-08 08:16:30 +0000 UTCI wouldn't mind seeing more stats. What are the current resistance multipliers, how many times have you attempted a task etc. That will help a lot in planning and know where to head next. You could make it an optional scientific table, hidden if players want to keep the knowledge out of sight.
Xargames
2017-05-08 07:38:40 +0000 UTCEasiest (lol) way to achieve the above is to halve the number of days the game goes for. If you increase the difficulty, but keep the game length, it will probably feel frustrating. As is, it's probably easy enough for even brand new players to get to 100 will all characters. So reduce the game length.
2017-05-08 07:29:53 +0000 UTCI like the idea, but please for the love of all gods don't make this game anything like dark souls. Its the most frustrating game ever and no one who is not a masochist ever played it. Personally i find the game challenging as it is. It took my several playthoughs to figure out what to do to get girl pass 100. And even now i have no idea how to get both serums, usually either one or another. Personally i feel that more scenes with mom would be nice. Similar to Lily, there should be a chance to interact with mom in her room.
Mike
2017-05-08 07:18:02 +0000 UTC
