--- title: Making difficulty curves in games | daily.dev description: A practical breakdown of how to design difficulty curves in games, covering what constitutes a 'new mechanic', how to smooth difficulty spikes, and concrete... canonical: https://daily.dev/posts/making-difficulty-curves-in-games-xvzgivfzw twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:site: @dailydotdev og:type: website og:site_name: daily.dev og:title: Making difficulty curves in games | daily.dev og:description: A practical breakdown of how to design difficulty curves in games, covering what constitutes a 'new mechanic', how to smooth difficulty spikes, and concrete... og:url: https://daily.dev/posts/making-difficulty-curves-in-games-xvzgivfzw og:image: https://api.daily.dev/og/posts/XvZgiVFZw.png og:image:alt: Making difficulty curves in games og:image:width: 1200 og:image:height: 630 og:locale: en --- > ## Documentation Index > Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://daily.dev/llms.txt > Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further. # Making difficulty curves in games **[Hacker News](https://daily.dev/sources/hn)** · 11 min read · 0 upvotes · 0 comments ## Summary A practical breakdown of how to design difficulty curves in games, covering what constitutes a 'new mechanic', how to smooth difficulty spikes, and concrete dos and don'ts for onboarding players. Includes a worked example of teaching wall-jumping across three level phases, plus empirical methods for gathering player feedback — death location heatmaps, level completion stats, expo playtesting, and streamer reviews. Also touches on dynamic difficulty adjustment, hiding shortcuts behind knowledge, and pacing emotional highs and lows. ## Full article daily.dev links to this article rather than hosting it. Read it at the original source: ## Questions this post answers ### What are good ways to collect empirical data on whether a game level is too hard or too easy? Several methods work well together: recording player death locations (clustered deaths signal a spike above the difficulty curve), tracking level completion rates (a big drop between two levels flags a problem), capturing gameplay footage to observe player thinking, playtesting at expos for first-time reactions, and using QA forums for structured feedback. Asking playtesters specific questions like 'how long did you spend on level 9?' and logging results in a spreadsheet helps surface outliers. _Game developers tracking level balance across builds keep up with design techniques like these on daily.dev._ ### What is the Portal 2 example of hiding a shortcut with player knowledge? In one Portal 2 level, the start and end points are placed close together, making it possible to skip the entire level with clever portal placement. The developers intentionally left this in: if a player can figure out the skip, they already know the techniques the level was designed to teach, so the level has nothing left to offer them. It is a deliberate design choice, not an oversight. _Developers building puzzle games find design decisions like this discussed alongside broader game-dev discourse on daily.dev._ ## Community take How the wider developer community reacted, aggregated from 1 discussion and 49 comments across hackernews (as of 2026-08-09). **TL;DR:** The community largely sidesteps the article itself to debate dynamic difficulty adjustment, with strong skepticism toward hidden DDA but more nuance around transparent or genre-appropriate implementations. Difficulty settings, SBMM in multiplayer, and level scaling in RPGs also spark lively tangents. **Sentiment:** 25% positive · 45% mixed · 30% skeptical **The case for** - Transparent, player-controlled difficulty options (like Hades' God Mode) are praised as a well-executed alternative to hidden adjustments. - Granular, per-mechanic difficulty sliders (as in some city builders) are highlighted as a great way to let players tailor their experience. - Factorio's emergent difficulty scaling through pollution mechanics is cited as a delightful, non-deceptive form of dynamic difficulty that fits the game's logic. - Hidden dynamic difficulty can work when well-integrated into a linear, narrative-driven game (e.g., Resident Evil 4). **The pushback** - Hidden dynamic difficulty adjustment feels cheap and unrewarding to players who notice it, undermining the sense of genuine accomplishment. - Level-scaling enemies (as in Oblivion or Diablo 4) remove the satisfaction of becoming more powerful and can trap players in unwinnable situations. - Forcing players through genre-mismatched mini-games (e.g., Simon Says puzzles in an MMO) is called out as a frustrating design failure. - Many turn-based JRPGs start with interesting tactical depth but devolve into repetitive move spam, suggesting poor late-game difficulty tuning. - The article's site reportedly disables keyboard scrolling, frustrating readers. **By community** - hackernews (mixed): Commenters engage substantively but mostly debate dynamic difficulty and SBMM rather than the article's core tutorial content, with opinions ranging from strong opposition to nuanced conditional support. **Hottest debate:** Whether dynamic difficulty adjustment should ever be used — and if so, whether it must be transparent to the player — divides commenters sharply, with examples cited both for and against. **Open questions** - When is hidden dynamic difficulty acceptable versus when does transparency become essential for player trust? - How should studios balance accessibility for casual players against the integrity of challenge that core audiences expect? - What is the right way to handle multiplayer skill-based matchmaking without making every session feel high-stakes? **Highlights** > It doesn't have to be deceptive! In Factorio, you build an automated factory on an alien world whose native inhabinants hate air pollution. If you spend your time gathering resources manually or with a humble-sized factory, there'd be very little alien hostility. But the better you're playing, the grander the factories, the more you're polluting, the more aggressive the aliens attack you. Furthermore, trees soak up CO2, so if you preserve them you reduce alien hostility, but if you go fully industrious and build on top of them you invite more alien aggression. I think this concept is delightful and far from deceptive. It makes the game suitable for players of all levels and it meshes with the game mechanism rather than working behind your back. hnews folks would also probably enjoy the cellular-automata-like mechanism of the pollution. Essentially the world is divided into cells and each cell has a pollution value. Pollution dissipates to nearby cells on regular intervals. Cells with trees soak up some pollution, cells with machines produce some pollution. A pollution map is available in-game. > — [safwat-halaby on hackernews · 1 comments](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49229997) > This depends a lot on the game and the situation. If hidden well enough i suspect it can play well. I really enjoyed the difficulty of Half Life Alyx for instance. I was saving my resources carefully because they seemed very sparse. But then I noticed that the loot was entirely dynamic. I forget the exact items, but if you only use one grenade it will only generate one refill hidden around the next area. If you use all your resources though, the upcoming loot gets massively increased and you can usually get almost all of it back right away. I learned this partway through and completely changed my playstyle and really broke the immersion to see the game difficulty change in realtime. I reloaded a save and played differently, and the next area was filled with loot instead of empty. But when asking my friends what they thought, none of them noticed that the game was doing this, and they all thought it was well balanced. On the other hand, some Mario games now will essentially have a "you are dying a lot, here is a star power up to help you out, or heres luigi to play the level for you" mechanic. For a super casual game, such a mechanic is great. Its optional. If you want to lock-in and beat the hard level, you can just not grab the powerup, or say no to the prompt. But if you are getting frustrated, you can skip the hard parts and fly through to the next level and get right back to having fun. > — [snailmailman on hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49228146) > Resident Evil 4 famously had a hidden dynamic difficulty setting that made the game easier if the player struggled. I think it worked because RE4 is a linear / ambiance based game. The game designer wants the player to progress in the story, and getting stuck on an impossible doesn't make sense except if the player chose a challenge mode. Contrast with Morrowing where it makes no sense having common bandit on the road carrying god-like equipment. > — [PetitPrince on hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49229138) > Yeah, Hades did this with God mode and it worked very well. > — [TulliusCicero on hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49228312) > You're only looking at one side. Dynamic difficulty also allows players to progress by lowering the health of a boss they've failed to beat for over two hours. Casual players giving up was a problem that no amount of shaming managed to fix ("haha skill issue, sucks to suck"). > — [gertop on hackernews · 3 comments](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49227576) **Source threads** - [hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49180649) · 116 points · 49 comments ## Similar posts on daily.dev - [Game Difficulty: Balancing Challenge and Accessibility](https://daily.dev/posts/game-difficulty-balancing-challenge-and-accessibility-viaamvkjh) · Game Designing · 1 upvotes · 0 comments - [Turning Taste into Deliverables: Making Stealth Game stealthy](https://daily.dev/posts/turning-taste-into-deliverables-making-stealth-game-stealthy-667bzfcku) · Medium · 0 upvotes · 0 comments --- Tags: [#game-development](https://daily.dev/tags/game-development), [#game-design](https://daily.dev/tags/game-design) [View this post on daily.dev](https://daily.dev/posts/making-difficulty-curves-in-games-xvzgivfzw) ```json {"@context":"https://schema.org","@graph":[{"@type":"Organization","@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization","name":"daily.dev","url":"https://daily.dev","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://daily.dev/apple-touch-icon.png","width":180,"height":180},"sameAs":["https://twitter.com/dailydotdev","https://github.com/dailydotdev","https://www.linkedin.com/company/daily-dev-ltd"]},{"@type":"WebSite","@id":"https://daily.dev/#website","url":"https://daily.dev","name":"daily.dev","publisher":{"@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization"},"potentialAction":{"@type":"SearchAction","target":{"@type":"EntryPoint","urlTemplate":"https://daily.dev/search?q={search_term_string}"},"query-input":"required name=search_term_string"}}]} {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"TechArticle","headline":"Making difficulty curves in games","url":"https://daily.dev/posts/making-difficulty-curves-in-games-xvzgivfzw","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://daily.dev/posts/making-difficulty-curves-in-games-xvzgivfzw"},"datePublished":"2026-08-09T01:01:24.963Z","dateModified":"2026-08-09T10:39:15.832Z","description":"A practical breakdown of how to design difficulty curves in games, covering what constitutes a 'new mechanic', how to smooth difficulty spikes, and concrete...","image":"https://media.daily.dev/image/upload/s--P4t4XyoV--/f_auto/v1722860399/public/Placeholder%2001","thumbnailUrl":"https://media.daily.dev/image/upload/s--P4t4XyoV--/f_auto/v1722860399/public/Placeholder%2001","isAccessibleForFree":true,"articleSection":"Hacker News","inLanguage":"en","publisher":{"@type":"Organization","name":"daily.dev","url":"https://daily.dev","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://daily.dev/apple-touch-icon.png","width":180,"height":180}},"author":{"@type":"Organization","name":"Hacker News","logo":"https://media.daily.dev/image/upload/t_logo,f_auto/v1/logos/hn","url":"https://daily.dev/sources/hn"},"commentCount":0,"discussionUrl":"https://daily.dev/posts/making-difficulty-curves-in-games-xvzgivfzw","interactionStatistic":[{"@type":"InteractionCounter","interactionType":{"@type":"LikeAction"},"userInteractionCount":0},{"@type":"InteractionCounter","interactionType":{"@type":"CommentAction"},"userInteractionCount":0}],"keywords":"game-development,game-design","timeRequired":"PT11M"} {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"BreadcrumbList","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"name":"Home","item":"https://daily.dev"},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"name":"Hacker News","item":"https://daily.dev/sources/hn"},{"@type":"ListItem","position":3,"name":"Making difficulty curves in games"}]} {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"FAQPage","@id":"https://daily.dev/posts/making-difficulty-curves-in-games-xvzgivfzw#faq","mainEntity":[{"@type":"Question","name":"What are good ways to collect empirical data on whether a game level is too hard or too easy?","acceptedAnswer":{"@type":"Answer","text":"Several methods work well together: recording player death locations (clustered deaths signal a spike above the difficulty curve), tracking level completion rates (a big drop between two levels flags a problem), capturing gameplay footage to observe player thinking, playtesting at expos for first-time reactions, and using QA forums for structured feedback. 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