Difficulty, Completion and Challenge

The 8-bit era was a wild time.

No-one really had much idea what made one of these new-fangled 'video games' good or bad, and making the games was primarily a battle against the limitations of the hardware.

One of the greatest limitations was that of saving progress - often it was non-existent. Games had to be completed at a single sitting, like it or not. The idea of escalating difficulty was adopted early. In practice, this meant that you'd play through the early parts of the game, reach the point where you were stuck, lose all of your lives, and repeat. That's the reason why the early levels of our favourite games are so indelibly burned into our memory - sheer repetition. In effect, the difficulty of the later stages of those games was artificially inflated by the effort required to reach them and to practice them. Nowadays the hardware limitations on saving have gone. So much so that I consider restrictions on when you can save - any restriction - a defect in the game (but that's a rant for another day).

Another holdover from those bad old days - perhaps the most poisonous one of all - is the fetishisation of difficulty. Playground braggadocio about how far you could get in Game X has metastasised in gaming as a medium. It's not a good thing for the hobby. Let people play how they want to play. It's particularly silly when the attitude extends to game developers. A game genre only grows when people are brought into it who wouldn't have played it otherwise. Drawing in newbies requires the game to be approachable, to have an 'easy mode' or equivalent. Similarly, hiding actual game content behind higher difficulty levels is obnoxious. It's not up to me to prove to a game that I'm worthy of its precious content, it's up to the game to prove to me that it's worthy of my time.

It goes without saying that refusing to include lower difficulties is also anti-accessibility. It's always possible for players to make a game more difficult for themselves by applying their own restrictions (enforcing their own Ironman rule or Nuzlocke rules set, even playing with an inappropriate controller) but the only way to make the game using outside methods is via cheats. For these reasons and more, it's better to err on the side of 'easy'.

It's fine to want to improve at a game. It's fine to want your preferred degree of challenge. It's not fine to want to force others to play at a degree of challenge they do not want; either as a player (by maintaining a toxic 'git gud' atmosphere) or as a developer (by gating content behind certain difficulty levels). To do so fundamentally misunderstands that the primary purpose of games is leisure. Imagine the sort of person who belittles anyone who goes for a walk through the countryside because they're not 'good enough' to be climbing a mountain instead. Imagine telling someone that the scarf they're knitting doesn't have a complicated enough pattern and they should feel bad. We readily recognise that behaviour as somewhat sociopathic in those contexts; in the video games hobby it's not just ignored but positively celebrated.

What does this mean For Splintered Realms Dizzy? The underlying engine supports saving anywhere (yay!) but it only has limited accessibility features. I'm not in a position to try to improve that. In Iron Tower Dizzy I made some deliberately devious puzzles, well outside the usual 'pick up and drop' format, and while they were good as puzzles there were a major road-block to players. I'm not trying to show off by making it particularly difficult this time. Also, because most of the game consists of parallel realms, it makes little sense to set out to make some more difficult. After all, the player might randomly pick a 'hard' one. Some will end up harder than others, of course, just because people approach puzzle-solving in different ways.

The demo gives you slightly different dialogue if you manage to complete it without dying. I'm planning on doing the same for the full game, and an extra congratulations if you manage to complete it without losing any energy. However, this is just a hearty pat on the back, no secret cutscenes or anything like that. I've been taking a short break after passing the 50% complete mark. Letting some new puzzle ideas gestate.