Hello fellow co-conspirators!
Puppet Master was always meant to be a hard game. As a gamer I like a bit of a bite in my usual fare; to really get the noggin thinking. So when testers came saying, the game was tough I was all "yup, makes sense" and got on doing smaller adjustements (like last update's shields).
However, a couple of playtest and streamer videos last month really opened my eyes that I might have a major problem on my hands. I was seeing vets, not new players, having trouble by the third or fourth region and that was a big issue. To investigate, I made an excel simulation of my game (much easier to modify then the game) and found.... well the game quickly became impossible.
And I'm not talking extraordinarily hard. I meant that if playing hard mode, by level 10-12 you'd be maxing out global exposure. The fact that we hadn't heard of this was because no one had reached that level yet... which should've been the first warning sign. So I speant this week reworking the difficulty balance, which meant I had to rework the difficulty backend. I can talk at length about this, but I won't bore you with the details.... I'll just show you these sexy excel graphs of the result:
Maybe not what you expected in a dev post, but a lot of game design happens on spreadsheets (which gets my designer heart fluttering). Here you can see that we would expect an average player on easy to reach level 4 difficulty and end the game with a global exposure just above 25%; if that player tries on hard mode, they would end up with over 80% exposure, and playing regions of difficulty 11. And if they try insane.....well, the game is still impossible at that point, so that's why I'm not shipping insane difficulty :P
This week I'll finish up the difficulty and send it out to testers to give it another go. I'll let y'all know if we get survivors!
Discord Challenge
A new challenge for our community will start soon; join our discord to check it out!
Happy conspiring!
Rafa
