Choose your difficulty

Hypnagonia is meant to be a hard game. The beauty of the game (and roguelikes in general) is achieving a victory through an unforgiving game, through luck or skill. However even as unforgiving as it is, victory should still be achievable by someone who is not an expert in these kind of games…eventually.

Due to this conflict of objectives, the game ends up being too easy for people who play it a lot and end up learning the optimal choices to do, or the tricks to exploit. Eventually, victory becomes a given and the challenge of the game evaporates until they move to something new.

To this end, most roguelites of this sort, implement increasing difficulty levels. Slay the Spire for example has Ascension levels which provide a standard increase in difficulty per increased ascension, to the point that even experts at the game can only achieve only like a 30% consistency in win rate.

Already Hypnagonia has some dedicated players which achieve a pretty consistent victory at the “standard” difficulty, and even though the new archetypes provide even more card pool combinations to try, sooner or later, the experience will grow stale (until at least I add the amount of Torments and non-ordeal events I would like).

So it is time to implement difficulty in Hypnagonia as well.

I decided to follow a Hades approach, where the player can pick and choose which difficulties to tweak, while I’m providing many possible things to tweak. This allows me to not have to balance each difficulty level on its own, and rather let the player figure out the balance that works for them. Good players can still keep adding more and more difficulty and see how high they can go before they cannot win consistently anymore.

This process however allows me to also add adjustments for the difficulty to go easier as well. If someone plays the game and finds that they struggle to progress, they can tone the difficulty lower than normal. Then as they learn the game better, they can start adjusting it higher as well.