Thread by @joegoroth

A hopefully short thread on how to make encounters feel better using workout patterns as a framework.

A trap a lot of people fall into is to make fights with waves and waves of baddies where each wave is slightly harder than the last. If we graph out the difficulty, it looks something like this.

It makes sense. The encounter gets harder as it goes on. The hope is cranking up the difficulty makes it more and more exciting.

But it has a few flaws.

1. The start is MUCH easier than the end. We want to kick up difficulty at the end, but we don't want to lie to players about what they are getting into, starting a bit closer to the end difficulty would allow players to understand the level of challenge they are signing up for.

2. Because the encounter is boiling over a long period of time, its hard to tell that the water is getting hotter. I can tell the difference between an easy encounter and a hard encounter. Its much harder to tell the difference between a medium encounter and a mediumer encounter.

3. The player feels weaker and weaker as time goes on. As the encounter just gets harder and harder, the player never gets to feel that powerful player fantasy they had at the start.

On the other hand, this is a pretty standard peloton workout. The Y axis represents how fast you are asked to ride, the X axis represents how far you are in the workout.

So they don't just ask riders to go faster and faster and faster until the ride is over. There are peaks and valleys in challenge, and the ride still ends at the hardest its ever been.

Lets apply this more dynamic difficulty model to an encounter to see what it might looks like.

In this model, our encounter still ends at a climax, but it has moments where you feel powerful and moments where you work hard. It does a better job of forecasting difficulty at the start, and it creates memorable moments through readable changes in difficulty.

With a more dynamic difficulty model not only is this single encounter more exciting, but its easier to change our peaks and valleys around from encounter and encounter to make the game feel more varied and rich.