I'm working on a video game. The design philosophy is to

>>382687209
What kind of game is it? Tell us more then its just a action game.

>>382688614
It's a 3rd person action. Melee stuff is like Ninja Gaiden or Bayonnetta but with a very minimal number of attacks (budget reasons. Making good looking animations takes awhile). Ranged combat will be like a 3rd person shooter but all weapons will be short-medium range. Ammo is limited to the point where you must melee often.

There is blocking but it's limited by shield durability, it's basically an 'oh shit' button rather than something you relay on. Parrying is the main form of defense because it's hard to time.

Enemies can respawn very fast in some zones. Think Ghosts and Goblins.

There's exploring, think early zelda games where you are given a small open hud world and can do the dungeons in any order. The last dungeon opens up when everything is cleared.

There will be platforming with fall damage. No one hit deaths from fucking up platforming though.

There will be some spells which are basically your ultimate attacks.

The time limit is what will make the game so hard. If you take too long the bad guy automatically wins and your file is gone. (exact story reason isn't worked out yet. Has to do due with a food shortage). When you die it takes a certain amount of time to recover, meaning you can only die a certain number of times before failing due to time. Depending on how efficient you are you can die 2-5 times over the entire game.

There's minor RPG stuff with a level up system and equipment. Equipment has limited durability and repairing isn't an option. If equipment breaks it loses about half it's stat value. Equipment is more tactical than "numbers going up". Ie some equipment is better at killing bosses and you'll need to ration it well.

For easier difficulty settings, change nothing about the world, Just raise the player's strength/health.

>>382687209
>make the game extremly difficult and demanding

I doubt that

>>382687209
Have more ammo and armor dosent break as much, also make it so you can die more times and not be forced to delete your save.

>>382691328
>>382691328
There's 2 ways I can make you die more times.

The first is to just make it so it takes less time to recover. So you lose 6 hours instead of 12. The second is to actually give you more time. So you lose 12 hours but you have a whole week before the food shortage. The second is even easier because it means you can be bad at exploring and won't die from time as much.

As for armor there's also two ways to do it. The first is that armor just had more durability. This means you get to keep the pieces for longer. So that boss killing armor you found, you might be able to use it on more bosses. The other way is to just give you more armor. In this way you won't get to use the boss killing armor anymore but look you found some armor that gives some other bonus.

bumping for interest

>>382690061
Sounds like faster enemies/projectiles and maybe giving a few enemy-types additional projectiles at harder difficulties are a good start to getting a smoother difficulty progression.

Make the ending you get for playing easy mode the bad one. This way more people will replay your game to try and get the good ending. Plus, if you make easy mode really shit easy, jumping up a difficulty could prove to be a fun challenge if the gameplay isn't shit

Pretty much; easy mode = bad ending

How much have you gotten done? Programming, art, writing?

>>382690061
If you end up making a babby-tier mode (like, hyper easy, enemies that very rarely attack and when they do they do extremely low damage, enemies that die very quickly, enough time to fill whatever data type you are using for storing it [int, float,double,etc], you get the gist) and you don't call it "let's player mode" i'll be disappointed

>>382692796
The current idea is to lock the final dungeon out completely. They did that in some of the contra games and it seemed to motivate people well. In Shattered Soldier if you played on easy at a certain point the bad guy would just nuke you from orbit. You need something like that to shock the player. After seeing that you either man up and play on a higher difficulty or go whine on the internet (which is a type of advertising).

>>382692725
At a certain point giving the player more health just makes it so he doesn't need any reaction time at all. When they ported difficult arcade games to the NES and made them easier they slowed the enemies down rather rather than give the player more HP.

>>382687209
Your design process is flawed because you can't rejigger difficult systems to create easy systems.
Difficult systems require the player to actively think, learn, and plan.
Easy systems require handling by the type of idiot that defeats regular idiotproofing.
You would have to redesign a system from the ground up if one part of it views sentience as a requirement, and the other part of it views sentience as user error.

For an enemy to die easier, the player has to -try- to kill them.
I've seen the type of retard that plays games. They often fail at this first step.
For an enemy that slows down so you can react to them, you need a player who reacts to enemies -at all-.
Quest markers assume that "Lost" vs "On track" is a state your players -can be in-, that they are capable of identifying whether where they are is where they want to be.
More ammo for strong attacks is good, but I'm guessing you're assuming the player will use the strong attacks because they're strong, rather than (say) because the attacks are flashy and the player is awed by the pretty lights more often.

You can make your game a forgiving challenge, or a punishing challenge. That's easy enough.
But you aren't going to make a game adaptable to the average user by changing around the numbers.

It requires a different thought process - one that assumes that the user's role is to be a retard and fuck things up in creative ways, and find ways to minimise the effect of the user's retardation.
It's to mitigate the effect of user input.
It's to view the existence of the player as an active force as a pathology that must be designed around.

Make your game so that it wins itself
and make your game so that it -pretends- the player is winning it.
That's what you need to do.

>>382695675
The best thing to do is to make it so the controls on the control pad?
They don't do what the action card says.
Instead, your game calculates what the player SHOULD do
And when the player presses a button, the game does it.