Shigeru Miyamoto, in a conversation with Dragon Quest designer, Yuji Horii, states that he always plans to reduce the difficulty of his games by 20%. These types of numbers tend to be arbitrarily derived from experiences unique to each developer (and Miyamoto himself jokes that the percentage criteria isn’t always “concrete”).  But the point stands that what the devs consider “easy” or “playable” isn’t in sync with their players. This means that difficulty reduction has to be a necessary part of difficulty balancing even before playtesting.

More importantly, how a team chooses to balance difficulty requires making assumptions about who their players are and which changes will result in the optimal difficulty (not too easy, not too hard) for them. You can do this by “stepping into the player’s shoes.”  In other words, you have to work towards an understanding of the player’s expectation for his or her skill level and progress in the game.

When we tested Super Nut Jump (SNJ), we learned that a majority of the players found the game too difficult the first time they played. Specifically, players found it difficult to “catch” the squirrel with the trampoline once they reached the first nut. The effort it took to get the squirrel to that point would immediately feel like a chore, and they would stop playing shortly thereafter.

When bouncing the squirrel to reach the nuts, the squirrel moves in a smooth arc through the air. But when it hits a nut, it bounces off and speeds to the ground in an unexpected angle. Looking at the game from the player’s perspective, we knew that no player could possibly anticipate that transition based on previously established in-game movements (and the playtest proved this point). We knew we had to organically build up the difficulty, instead of breaking suddenly away from it.

Knowing this, we adjusted the game so that the squirrel moved consistently with established movement patterns in the game, rather than suddenly breaking out into incredible speed, velocity, and angle.  We also made it easier to get up to the nuts, so that if you did crash, you didn’t feel like you wasted a lot of time.

In any creative endeavor, you must serve the work, not your needs. By looking at difficulty from our own perspectives, we ended up creating a game that people found too difficult to play.  By really looking at the game from the player’s perspective, and understanding what their expectations were from the behaviors we established in the game, we managed to make SNJ more accessible and fun to play.