Re: Level difficulty

[Gervase Lam]

> From: Ingo Ruhnke
> Subject: Re: Level difficulty
> Date: Saturday 03 April 2004 15:31 pm

> John August writes:
> > Rather than just having a single difficulty indicator, it might be
> > better to have 2 or 3.

> I am
> thinking that reducing the difficulty to a handfull of words might be
> a good idea, which than could be represented by little icons, so we
> would get something like:
>
> tutorial - levels that teach new stuff
> joyride - levels that are pretty obvious
> normal - levels that require some thinking
> tricky - levels that require some more thinking
> mastermind - levels that require some though thinking
> endurance - levels that require doing something obvious, but requiring
>   doing that for a long perioud of time (ie. digger to reduce the fall
> height)
> race - some level that requires quick reactions, say a bunch of
> jumpers that need to be coordinated

I think John has a good point here.  There could be a level where the 
first part requires "Endurance" and the second part requires "Race".  I 
suppose each of those two categories could be given the difficulty levels 
of "Joyride", "Normal" and "Tricky".

I was about to say that having categories may not be a good idea because 
there could be levels that don't fit into any category.  However, thinking 
of when I played Lemmings, I think all the levels boil down to "Endurance" 
and "Race".

The only (weak) exception I can think of is that there may be a level that 
is eye candy only.  The only reason it may exist is because this "eye 
candy" could give a significant clue to what is coming next or it may have 
something to do with the story line involving the current island, for 
example.

I like the idea of using words to show how difficult things are.  However, 
I don't think there are enough words above.

A while back there was a psychological paper written that concluded that 
humans could distinctly categorise things up to a resolution of 7 (i.e. 
give things a mark out of 7).  I think marking the difficulty of each 
level out of 100 is silly.  Can anyone clearly and consistently tell the 
difference between a level with a score of 74 and a level with score of 75?

I think that marking each level out of 10 is the most natural way to do 
things, even if the scoring has a little bit too much resolution.  The 
person finds the most difficult level and gives it a 10.  The person then 
finds the easiest level and gives it a 0.  The person can then easily 
compare each of the other levels against the easiest and most difficult 
levels to find out what level of difficult the level should have.

Thanks,
Gervase.