Yet Another Bulletin Board

Welcome, Guest. Please Login or Register.
Mar 29th, 2024, 12:01pm

Home Home Help Help Search Search Members Members Login Login Register Register
Pizza Business Forum « Post reply »


   Pizza Business Forum
   General
   Development
   Post reply ( Re: should we have seperate levels of difficulty? )
Post reply
Subject:
Full name:
Email:
Message icon:
Add YABBC tags:
Add Smileys:
Message:

Disable Smilies:

Check this if you'll be adding code (or don't like smileys).

shortcuts (IE and NS6 only): hit alt+s to send, alt+p to preview, or alt+r to reset


Topic Summary
Posted by: Jeff Koerner Posted on: Mar 29th, 2003, 3:34pm
WHAT DOESN'T WORK:
having 'difficulty' settings seems like the wrong way to go to me.
 in my experience the 'easy' setting always turns out to be too easy and the 'hard' setting is always too hard. having difficulty settings might mean that we would have to design, implement, test, and debug several different versions of gameplay and follow more than one to completion. I don't think that's fair to the programmer, especially since not everyone will be playing all levels of difficulty, and that means that all the time spent on whatever levels don't get played is entirely wasted.
 making you choose a level of difficulty from the very beginning and sticking with it seems like a bad idea because you don't want to force a decision like this on the player before he has any experience with what the game is like. as an example, say the player chooses a difficulty setting and after playing for an hour decides that she chose wrong: it's too hard or too easy for her. now she must either continue playing something she doesn't like or else start over and lose any progress she's made. the only available responses are both unacceptable and will frustrate the player.
WHAT DOES WORK:
instead, make the game 'easy' at the beginning and ramp up the difficulty level as the game progresses
 make the start easy while the player gets used to the interface and gameplay, and then start adding complexity during the game to make it more interesting/challenging. this way all players are exposed to all the programming work that's done, the 'easy' mode at first and the 'hard' mode later with a healthy mix inbetween. If you want a 'difficulty' setting, then it should be implemented at the level of the AI so that we can control when the player should be given a rough time and when to go easy on her.
THE REAL PROBLEM:
we have to create a gameplay system that relies on simple rules that can be easily learned, but at the same time we have to create problems/goals sufficiently complex to be of interest to the player and to allow for more than one solution.
WHEN SOMETHING IS TOO HARD:
 if a certain task turns out to be exceedingly difficult to the player, we should make the task optional rather than simply taking the whole thing out of the 'easy' game and adding it to the 'hard' game. an example would be puzzles in an RPG which you don't need to complete to beat the game, but that would give you a good item.
WHEN THE PLAYER SPENDS MOST OF THEIR EFFORT FIGURING OUT THE INTERFACE RATHER THAN MAKING A STRATEGY:
then ideally the interface needs to be stream-lined, but there is an easier solution with or without adding levels of difficulty: add a 'tutorial/training/practice' mode. this could teach you how to play the game without making you play all the way through an 'easy' campaign.
I realize my thinking isn't specific to the simulation genre, but is more general towards all games. what do you think?
Posted by: ares32585 Posted on: Mar 29th, 2003, 3:48pm
I agree completely that difficulty levels wouldn't work well at all in a simulation game like this.  As for ramping up the difficulty as the game goes on, I think this is pretty much built into the game design that we have created.  Perhaps we could have an option that allows the player to decide whether to have AI competitors and how many of them to have.  That is, if the player wants a straightforward game, he can play with no AI competitors.  Lastly, it seems to me that designing a simple yet robust interface will be one of the most difficult aspects of the game, so we should not take interface design lightly.
Posted by: Jeff Koerner Posted on: Mar 29th, 2003, 4:41pm
well difficulty levels can work sometimes, Civilization comes to mind, but I bet it would take a lot of work and why should we do that if there's an easier way?
 
in response to how difficult the opposing restaurant AI should be--if there's any at all--maybe we could create several different 'cities': you can start out by building in a small town without much competition(and without many customers) but as time goes by, it could grow into a big city with lots of competition(and lots of customers).
 
lastly, I think that the interface design would be easier if we had a clear definition of what makes the game fun, or at least a better idea of what it is exactly in the gameplay that players enjoy. once that's figured out, all we have to do is connect the gameplay with the player by the simplest, most logical display possible.
Posted by: ares32585 Posted on: Mar 31st, 2003, 3:27pm
Quote:
in response to how difficult the opposing restaurant AI should be--if there's any at all--maybe we could create several different 'cities': you can start out by building in a small town without much competition(and without many customers) but as time goes by, it could grow into a big city with lots of competition(and lots of customers).  

 
Well, I think it would be really difficult to come up with some way that a town can grow into a city.  But perhaps here's a better way to offer various levels of difficulty:  letting the player choose the number of AI opponents that he will be competing against in a city.  For example, if the player chose a very small town in which to build his restaurant(s), and then he decides to have 5 AI opponents, all those opponents competing in such a small area would create a very difficult game.  In this way, there are no artificial difficulty levels, but the difficulty can be adjusted in more natural ways.
 
Quote:
lastly, I think that the interface design would be easier if we had a clear definition of what makes the game fun, or at least a better idea of what it is exactly in the gameplay that players enjoy. once that's figured out, all we have to do is connect the gameplay with the player by the simplest, most logical display possible.

 
I agree that that's what we will need to do concerning the interface.  However, I have a feeling that it will prove more difficult than any of us might think.
Posted by: Jeff Koerner Posted on: Mar 31st, 2003, 8:24pm
yeah, allowing the player to choose the # of AI players is a great idea, but it will take awhile before the player gets a feel for what kind of settings she wants; for example, no one is going to pick up the game for the first time and be able to understand the relative difficulty of playing a game in a size 10,000 town with 5 opponents vs. playing in a size 25,000 city with only 3 opponents. there is going to end up being either difficulty levels which adjust these values appropriately, or else there's going to have to be an 'easy' value setting by default so that when they play the first time they'll be able to figure stuff out. again the possibility of a tutorial level seems useful. Since there probably isn't that much information about a city, I assume it will just get lumped into the saved game file rather than require its own seperate file to load as a city or region or whatever. and to create scenarios we could tweak the values and then save a game on the first turn. then to play the scenario the player just loads that game. Customization is good, but a new player isn't going to know how to customize things until they play the game first, so don't make them try to figure out what numbers to choose from the start.
Posted by: ares32585 Posted on: Apr 1st, 2003, 1:57pm
Well, actually, it's likely that a city will have enough information to warrant its inclusion in a separate file.  The default settings for a game would definitely need to include no AI players.  The city size wouldn't really be a big deal in this instance, because the city size really only becomes an issue when the player is competing with other AI players.
Posted by: inconspicuous Posted on: Apr 3rd, 2003, 12:29am
what kind of information is going to be city-specific then? is a certain city going to have certain kinds of customers, or are all customers over the world going to be generated exactly the same? I'd like to know how choosing one city over another is going to make a difference.
Posted by: ares32585 Posted on: Apr 3rd, 2003, 4:45am
Well, the population of the city would be differentl.  The various regions would have different population makeups, i.e. one region might have lots of old people and very few young people.  And also, the placement of these regions will also be different.
 
The city won't make a huge difference in the game; choosing one city over the other won't really make that much of a difference.  It's just that various cities will provide slightly different games each time so that the player doesn't get bored.
Posted by: johnny Posted on: Apr 3rd, 2003, 8:05am
What I was taught in school was that the user is 'stupid'. Well, not really stupid, but if you think that the user is stupid, then you should design the interface for a stupid user.
 
It could be possible to include difficulty levels. Why bother the adverage user with numbers to generate a map and difficulty settings? Just make it plain and simple: Easy, Avg., and Hard, where Average is the default. Then you can tie a population/city to each difficulty setting as well as the number of competiting restaurants. And then you can add an advance feature to customize the difficulty even further as stated in earlier posts.
Posted by: ares32585 Posted on: Apr 3rd, 2003, 1:34pm
Quote:
It could be possible to include difficulty levels. Why bother the adverage user with numbers to generate a map and difficulty settings? Just make it plain and simple: Easy, Avg., and Hard, where Average is the default. Then you can tie a population/city to each difficulty setting as well as the number of competiting restaurants. And then you can add an advance feature to customize the difficulty even further as stated in earlier posts.

 
Well, I don't think it would be that the user would generate a city; rather, he would choose one of the available cities that we would have to provide.  I don't know if I misunderstood everyone else, but I never thought that the player would have to take care of making the city and that the population of the city would be fixed.  I just thought that we would provide the player with set cities that he could make a simple selection from at the beginning.  Something like this:
 
Choose a city:
Chicago (large, population 1,000,000)
Townsville(small, population 2,000)
Milwaukee (medium, population 400,000)
 
Choose the number of AI competitors (note:  the more Ai competitors there are, the more difficult the game will be):
1
2
3
4 ... etc.
Posted by: inconspicuous Posted on: Apr 6th, 2003, 11:19pm
I think we're all on the same page here(pun intended). We agree that there needs to be varying degrees of challenge, but it's not clear how this is going to be presented to the player. I think we should save that question for later, actually. No matter what choices concerning difficulty we leave to the player--and no matter how we offer those choices-- they will all end up as actual numerical values in the game. therefore, first we have to have a feel for how those different numbers play, and in order to do that we need a working model of the game that includes the concepts of unique Cities and of AI opponents. Let's concentrate on how those two aspects of the game should function before we worry ourselves with how to present the variations to the players.

Pizza Business Forum » Powered by YaBB 1 Gold - SP 1.2!
YaBB © 2000-2003. All Rights Reserved.