My game was too hard - how difficulty perception skews during development
Yesterday I was SUPER excited to find that someone had streamed my game! LD44 is my first, and this is the first time I've experienced a stranger playing something I've made so it was super awesome.
I was so glad to hear the positive comments happened exactly as expected - the way the guillotine mechanic was unveiled and the reaction it would provoke was a big part of the design approach, and it paid off! And I knew exactly the frustration that was to come, because almost every comment on the game mentions the same thing: the difficulty, driven by a big implementation misstep that marks every play experience with a tinge, or more, of negativity.
The design mistakes are covered in the postmortem, but that only tells one part of the story.
Balancing a game is hard. Balancing the difficulty of a game being made in a weekend with no playtesters is harder. I suspected the game might be too difficult when it was published, and that was confirmed as the comments came in. But seeing it visually represented just how much of an error in judgment was made when tweaking the gameplay.
wormy actually moves more slowly than throughout most of the weekend. wormy was made fast because of worries about player frustration at dying, and then having to slooooowly crawl back through the level they had already done 90% of. I underestimated how players would approach the game and that the core mechanic would be engaging enough to keep people interested for the few minutes that are spent on playing a jam game. The difficult swung waaaaaaay too hard in the opposite direction.
I've put some of my gameplay alongside YourBr0ther's stream to show how tainted my perception of the game was after playing it all weekend, compared to that of a newcomer. I'm not a Snake expert at all, but wormy's controls became natural to me over time in a way that impacted the released game. Another valuable lesson learnt for next time!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DgDbMHh-Eyk
Thank you so much to https://twitch.tv/YourBr0ther for playing the game, and for sticking with it for so long! I'm super happy that I got to see a great person play it! He streamed a bunch of LD games, so yours might be in there too!