



I've spent the last three days hosting play-tests for my solo game WAJU. Adjusting the difficulty curve to accommodate for a wide range of players got me thinking about fun in a less traditional way. It's usually easy to tell what makes winning fun. Victory is generally satisfying, and developers design hoping to maximize that satisfaction. However, players usually lose more frequently than they win. In fact, players should lose more than they win. But those frequent losses can fog the game's fun factors, or worse, cause users to quit all together. So the big question everyone should be asking is, how do we make dying fun?













The Threat of Losing

This is the obvious one. If you can't lose, you can't really win. Almost all designs are built on lose conditions, but often only for the sake of winning. The issue is, the threat of dying doesn't making dying itself fun. The fun is in the evasion of death.





Victory on the brink of defeat has created some of my most memorable and exciting gaming moments. These experiences are most easily produced with health systems. Each health point lost should build excitement and motivation. While that excitement building can be an absolute thrill ride, it also serves as justification for the players death. If you're surviving on one health point, dying may be upsetting but it's reasonable.









WAJU has no health system, so you're always on the brink of death This requires I approach tension differently.The threat of death is determined through a binary decision each frame of the game. You're either about to die or you're not, and no amount of almost dying moves you closer to death afterword. With insta-death, there are no consequences to having played poorly if you beat the immediate threat. Similarly, if you have played perfectly but slip up just once, you've lost, you're dead, it's over. The player is experiencing massive swings in perspective with barely any anticipation. This sort of emotional whiplash has to be accounted for. If dying itself isn't fun, fun is halted the instant the threat of death is actualized.





Replay-ability

For dying to be fun, your previous life needs to leave you with at least one of these four things

Memorization

The Process of Elimination

Obvious Dexterity Improvements

Carry Over Resources

The above respawn ideals are dependent only partly on level design. Proper spawn point placement is the other half of the challenge. Take Super Meat Boy for example, a game in which players are willing to die hundreds of times in one sitting. The trick is that meat boy respawns instantly, just seconds from the finish line. This super fast turnover time allows players to quickly commit patterns to memory , fail fast for the process of elimination , and develop level specific muscle memory to look progressively more bad ass and dexterous .





Check out this play-testers progression through a small scene in WAJU.





Death one. Jumping off the outlets head is a fun experience, but there is nothing to be gained from playing it more than once. So the respawn checkpoint is sitting right at the top of that ledge. My goal with this scene was to teach the player about chaining attacks.









Death two. There's obvious memorization from the last death in a perfectly timed hop over the stinger. The player's dexterity is substantially more satisfying to watch. They then dash right into the middle of their foes. Bold moves like this are encouraged since the respawn wait/distance is basically non-existent. There is essentially no punishment for failing, which allows for experimentation and thus a quick process of elimination .









On the playtester's third re-spawn, having previously charged right into the fight, they back up and take on the enemies more cautiously. Right before they die you can see them figure out the solution. In that last minute they lined up a combo attack with the bee but had to bail out because of the stinger. On try four they execute the attack perfectly.





Over the span of a few seconds this player died and respawned four times. Out of context that sounds like an awful experience. Here, they're quickly mastering a pretty rewarding move. The short respawn distance lets them attack the problem without reserve. The threat of death isn't really a factor here, instead death is used as a helpful tool. What makes this section fun is a one-two punch. If the player had the resources to live longer, they would naturally draw out the fight, delaying the cool thing. It's way more fun to die and reset the board quickly. In a few seconds they've mastered a flashy move they can use the rest of the game.





Before moving on, I want to note the "Carry Over Resources" bullet point. In games like WOW, Terraria, and Sword of Ditto, the player can find their corpse and collect some of their previously held resources. This keeps the player from rage quitting the instant they lose. Instead they have to put themselves back into the action, ideally re-engaging them in the experience.





The Difficulty Curve

The gaming community is no stranger to god-awful death screens. In the early 90's, developers didn't have the computing power to produce long games so they made them extremely hard instead. Most designers now focus on the fairly well known concept of flow. The premise is that there is a sweet spot between reward and punishment that keeps your users constantly engaged. This concept is often manifested in difficulty curve graphs. There are piles of theories as to the best difficulty curves for various genres, but here are a few of the popular approaches.





I've seen this one floating around the internet a lot. I wasn't able to find the original source.

The games difficulty grows quickly, then slopes to rebuild the players confidence, before they face their biggest threats yet. Despite its popularity among theorists, there are many classic and well-balanced games that don't use it.





Bellow is a series of graphs take from a 2016 scientific study on video game difficulty curves.

You can purchase the full study here - https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1875952116000045





Personally I'm a pretty big fan of (g), which is echoed by Mata Haggis in a 2017 GDC talk about storytelling in games. Mata refers to this as the flow channel.





The flow channel is designed to repeatedly challenge and then reward the player. Each challenge crest is harder than the last, complimented by a trough in difficulty. The biggest rewards are often found in the troughs, where the player is able to easily conquer a challenge equal to what was previously a crest. Making a game consistently harder over time limits the players ability to show off the competences they gained early in the experience.





For dying to be fun, the player needs to be reminded that their previous deaths lead to something worthwhile. These troughs in difficulty are a reminder that, with diligence, losing pays off.





I've compiled a graph based on my playtesters deaths over time in WAJU. Admittedly, my sample size of 20 users is fairly small. However, I found the information to be super valuable. Note this is for a 15 minute demo, the above charts are for entire feature length games.





I want WAJU to be an intense thrill ride, so the game isn't built to slow down too much. That said, tension loses its potency if it's a constant. Most of the troughs in that graph are platforming sections between combat. I found that I could use those sections to simulate high stakes, without players taking too many loses. Ideally, that sort of safe empowerment will make them feel unbeatable for the next challenge.





Conclusion

If victory is the only satisfying portion of your game, players will likely spend the majority of the game dissatisfied. Difficulty should be complemented by reminders of progression. Death isn't necessary a punishment; it can be a helpful tool. Lastly, the medium of video games should be experimented with constantly. All of the above information is based on a hand full of developers knowledge about a shelf full of games. If you're breaking all of these rules and keeping your players engaged, share your process for future devs!





Thanks for reading, have fun dying.







