When everyone is working on separate areas/mechanics/levels, how does this unify into a coherent experience in terms of difficulty curve? I’d say you are working the second or third level, how are you to judge how difficult it is allowed to be or what challenges from prior levels are you allowed to throw at the players?

boynextdoornews

System designers manage difficulty curves. It is up to them to tweak numbers and timing in order to make sure difficulty feels good along the way. They work primarily within formulas and spreadsheets in order to keep things predictable for the general experience (normal moment-to-moment gameplay), and adjust individual elements of special encounters for a more hand-tailored high impact result (e.g. boss battles).

The formulas are how we scale difficulty are primarily for two factors - how long it takes to finish the encounter, and how much danger we expect the player to be in during those encounters. These two factors are broken down into several different sub-categories - damage, damage avoidance, damage reduction, accuracy, time per attack, etc. We can tweak each of these factors to adjust play experience while maintaining a cohesive overall whole. An encounter that feels dangerous will have higher spike damage, while an endurance battle will take longer. We use the formulas to establish a baseline, then tune the individual encounters we want accordingly. This creates an expected experience band for players, which we verify through playtests.

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