Mr. Smoozles Goes Nutso - Game Difficulty

I've been thinking about the idea of difficulty for the game. Although I'd already started implementing differing degrees of difficulty in the game, I had the feeling that something wasn't right.

My initial thought was to have three degrees of difficulty presented to the player as a choice when they chose to start a new game: Easy, Normal and Hard. I've already implemented objects so that they vary their speed according to the difficulty and set up Mr. Smoozles so that he behaves slightly differently depending on the setting, too. Which all works fine.

Then I implemented some additional clues into the game so that on an easy setting you would get to see these, which worked well enough in testing and felt very good without over-doing it.

So what was the problem?

I'm classing the game as an arcade adventure, for want of a better term. The adventure interface has been simplified from what you'd expect in a "pure" adventure (though the puzzles are still as valid) but in many ways it is layered on top of the arcade gameplay. While not being completely separated, they are different aspects of the whole gameplay experience. This meant that I should be offering more choice in the settings to the player.

So in addition to the Easy, Normal and Hard settings for the arcade gameplay, there are also two settings for the adventure gameplay - Normal and Additional Clues.

What this means is that players of a number of dispositions and abilities will be able to tailor the game settings to match how they want to play the game. Hopefully, this will make the game as accessible as possible to a larger number of potential players.