Taste of Thomas

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 eno...