Design of Difficulty in the Shovel Knight Series

This is a written version of a talk I did a couple of years ago before the release of King of Cards.

There's more than one way of giving a game multiple levels of difficulty. A lot of games opt for a simple difficulty slider that affects damage and health numbers of the player and enemies. However, it's well-established that this can be a flawed system when trying to optimise player fun. It's much easier to balance a game and get a good difficulty curve when designing around only one set of these constants.

I will now break down my experiences playing the first three games in the Shovel Knight series and how they manage variable difficulty. No game in the Shovel Knight series has a way to choose a nominal level of difficulty, but choices a player makes in the games can affect their difficulty.

Shovel Knight

I found Shovel Knight very hard. The character has very limited reach in only a couple directions with his shovel and a lot of his magic items didn't feel useful enough for me to use much; paired with the many enemies that fly around in the air or shoot projectiles in all different directions, I found it difficult to avoid damage in a lot of circumstances. Perhaps I'm not very good at platformers, but I had to repeat some areas many times due to tight platforming and ubiquitous instant death spikes/pits, coupled with enemies that will knock you out of your jumps. In fact towards the end of the game it became like monkeys and typewriters: If I repeated the same section enough, I would eventually get through, but I didn't really feel like I was improving at the game. Having to go back to a checkpoint after failing a jump, and not being able to immediately retry it, makes it harder to learn from your mistakes and improve.

A lot of the game was still fun, but I would have enjoyed it more if it were easier. For me the highlight was the bosses. They too were difficult enough that they could take many attempts to beat, but I felt that I was improving at these fights the more I tried and I enjoyed mastering their patterns. The fact that they can be immediately retried after each defeat contributed to that.

The only way to make Shovel Knight easier is to use the Phase Locket item excessively, which temporarily makes you invulnerable; I didn't realise this when I played. This isn't a good option. It is merely a way of avoiding some of the experience, rather than enhancing it.

The other games have better ways of making the game easier and incidentally Shovel Knight is my least favourite of the three.

Specter of Torment

Specter of Torment is intentionally easier than Shovel Knight. Specter Knight's longer mêlée reach combined with his air-dash and wall climb make him much more mobile and more able to deal with environmental and enemy hazards. The wall jumping in this game is my favourite of any game I've ever played. The short wall climb allows for more controlled movement and therefore more varied platforming challenges, whilst in other scenarios allowing the player to be less precise. His abilities also allow you to recover from your mistakes by employing platforming skill, albeit not jumping skill.

However despite the game being easier than Shovel Knight, I still found myself dying more often than I would like. Luckily the game has a solution to this. One of the alternate costumes you can buy with in-game currency makes it so that you don't instantly die when you fall into a pit or hit spikes. Instead you just take damage and appear back where you were before falling in.

This provided the instant feedback that I talked about earlier, allowing me to correct my jumps and learn more easily from my mistakes. Over time I felt less and less need to use this costume and eventually bought a different one and didn't look back.

Difficulty systems in games often run into the following problems for the player:

• By changing aspects of the game, such as the geometry or the enemy numbers, the player loses opportunities to improve at the game.
• By having easier or less challenges, a player may miss out on the feeling of satisfaction from overcoming difficult problems.
• By having a fixed level of difficulty or no incentive to increase the difficulty to the intended level, the game may become too easy for a player and they don't/can't get out of it.
• A player might choose to play in a way that is less fun because that way is more optimal and so it feels silly not to.

Specter of Torment gets around all of these problems. By choosing to play in the easier way, you have to spend currency and use up an item slot, depriving you of a different ability. The game disincentivises players from choosing this upgrade if they don't need it, and gives a benefit to players who choose to stop using it. The player still has to overcome all of the same challenges as someone playing on normal difficulty, but they are punished less harshly for failing and less of their time is spent redoing previous areas. As a result, the ability acts as a kind of 'training wheels' for the player, making it easier for them to get good at the actual game as it was intended to be played.

Plague of Shadows

Plague of Shadows is intentionally harder than Shovel Knight. Plague Knight's core mechanic is the bomb jump which give you sudden upwards momentum, which is used to make long arcing jumps across the screen. It's combined with a small double jump and using your primary attack in the air to halt your momentum and briefly stay airborne. This sporadic movement is difficult to get used to using in a controlled manner. There is a much higher skill ceiling for Plague Knight's movement and the game fully tests your mastery of it.

The game is difficult enough that it took me two or three attempts to beat the tutorial level. A short way into the game you're able to purchase an upgrade that causes you to fall slowly out of each bomb jump, with the option to press down to fall at normal speed again.

Once again this makes the game easier while avoiding common problems. The player still has to overcome the same challenges; the enemies and levels are unchanged, but the player's imprecision is less harshly punished, and the player can immediately act on their inaccuracy. There is an incentive to drop this upgrade because the player is still encouraged to spend less time in the air where they are more vulnerable. It can't be used alongside more interesting and offensive upgrades. The ability doesn't take away what's fun about the game.

Once again I used this for some time until I got the hang of the tricky platforming and then proceeded without it.

Conclusion

I would rank these games as follows from high to low: Specter of Torment, Plague of Shadows, Shovel Knight — with there being a more significant gap between Plague of Shadows and Shovel Knight. I feel this way even though I found Plague of Shadows harder.

My experiences with this series are proof-enough to me that more easy or more difficult are not directly correlated with enjoyment so much as the way that difficulty is managed.