One of the hardest tasks when making a game, is the difficulty level balancing. No matter what you do, there will be always someone that will say “game is too easy” and someone else that will say “game is too hard”!

For this I think that a classic difficulty level setting in options menu should be required for almost every game. For simple games like arcade/action ones is hard to balance them, so I would suggest to do like Atlantis Sky Patrol: first levels are easy, then the difficulty generally increases as you play more of the game.

Various tricks have been implemented both in retail or in shareware scene. I remember many times to have read games that “auto-adjust” their difficulty based on player’s performances! like PES5 for example. If you win several matches in a row, to break the monotony you face sometime opponents playing tougher, even if this has a downside – playing with Brazil and having hard time to score 1 goal vs Burkina Faso (with all respect to this team!) spoils the overall game feeling.

If your game is complex like my rpg Magic Stones however you can use a nice trick: I have difficulty level too, but I added a new Quest Mode that has much tougher battles and some really requires lot of skill. But there’s a trick: since the game has strong rpg elements, you can just go aronud the lands and battle other monsters, collecting several avatar stones. Indeed, every time you get 10 stones of same avatar, your knowledge on this particular avatar increases, thus empowering it. So even a very weak level 1 avatar, once leveled this way, can become really a great weapon of destruction at your disposal.

This way, even players not very skilled can just wait and build up a strong deck of cards (avatars) then get back to that impossible battle in quest mode that had them almost give up the game 😉 in my opinion this is a very good way to keep the player playing the games even if he finds one particular points too hard, because he knows that he’ll be able to come back and eventually beat the opponent!