Pleasing everyone, all the time.

We’ve been balancing QuBIT last week, tweaking the various stats in the game to try and get the difficulty ramp just so. Our aim is to ramp the difficulty in such a way that everyone finds their level and enjoys slowly pushing the bar up from there. We’ve also tried to iron out any difficulty spikes so that each wave becomes a small but discernable amount harder and you never get stuck at the same spot time and again.

The stats that we change over the course of the game are all increased smoothly – I have been busting out some filthy factorials and other heavyweights of my Maths A-Level to turn series of numbers edited out of any semblance of order into neat, sweet sequences.

Since it is an infinite wave game, we don’t have the binary ‘you won’, ‘you did not win’ to deal with, everybody will lose in the end, by which of course I mean everybody will win…BIG! User testing with friends last night, I was encouraged that when they died, they didn’t feel like had done badly so they weren’t put off trying again. It helps that QuBIT never actually dies, when his energy runs out, MOThER, the mothership from whence he came, beams him up and your mission is over.

We have put a lot of positive feedback into the art and sound, which helps the player feel they are doing a good job. One thing you learn as a designer (if it wasn’t obvious already) is that we are all snivelling, needy wimps happy to quit as soon as we feel we might not be that good at something. We need to ensure players will want to invest enough time in the game to become good at it. Hopefully we are getting there but we’ll let you be the judges!