Hello everyone, When making or playing any video game, the amount of fun you’ll have often comes from how well balanced the difficulty is. Whether you are playing a shooter where you can choose the level of difficulty, or a platformer where it is tailored and presented to you. Finding the balance between laughably easy, challenging, or outright unfair is something many games fail to perfect, but in most cases you want to be aiming for somewhere in the middle. When you factor in scaling difficulties, new mechanics, exploits or overpowered abilities, finding that balance becomes harder and harder to achieve. [img]{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/41451099/7cb5a412c2756189e480c3b7e3e596aa8ded3120.png[/img] When designing and testing Jumphobia: Homeward Bound, going about setting the difficulty had its fair share of problems. As a platform style game there are no difficulty settings, but each level is made in such a way to attempt to teach a player new skills whilst remaining engaging and challenging. As a player learns new skills and techniques the difficulty naturally gets slowly harder. The first major problem we had whilst creating this game, is that we simply got too good at it. Spending several hours a day testing levels and concepts made each developer a lot more skilled than we gave ourselves credit for. When finally getting a new player to test out the level design, it was much to our surprise when told it was too difficult when we could complete the level with our eyes closed. Deciding what should be made easier and what should be made harder is no easy task and is mostly subject to the player's skill level. [img]{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/41451099/0b1ea3184f0cf6a2f3bae994d920e96247e4031d.png[/img] Conversely, sometimes the problem isn't the difficulty directly, but understanding the right way to go, or the correct way to go about completing a challenge or obstacle. To overcome these issues simply requires good level design (and a lot of testing with new players of course). Nothing is more disheartening than laying out a path for the player to take, only for the very first tester to do the exact opposite of what you intended. After reading all this you might be wondering how we managed to get the difficulty for this game right, if at all! The truth is we can’t be 100% sure until it’s released and more people have played it, but what we do know is that getting the difficulty right pays off. We believe we have put together a game with a difficulty that is easy to play but difficult to master, and players of all skill levels should be able to participate but also have a margin for improvement. These are some of the core ideals that make a game, like this one, fun. [img]{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/41451099/d2751ddb877569f8415366ea0265ecb856d06fb4.png[/img] But don’t take my word for it, check it out for yourself here and be sure to add it to your wishlist https://store.steampowered.com/app/1781380/Jumphobia_Homeward_Bound/ Max Brown Lead Programmer @ Wix Games