GAME: Mohs' Shift

Welcome to "Gratis Amateur Molydeux Elaborations", a series of articles wherein I take a game design idea from a tweet by @PeterMolydeux and elaborate on it, fleshing out the core concept into a very brief design document of sorts. It's "amateur" because I have minimal game design experience, and it's "gratis" because I'm offering these ideas free of charge! I don't have the time, dedication or resources to make any of these games real, so if a reader who possesses those three things wants to implement one of my designs, I will gladly do whatever is necessary to rescind any legal rights I might have to it (you're on your own accomplishing the same with Adam Capone, though he seems the type to be amicable about it). For serious. But I digress, on to the first GAME idea:

Game where the ability to instantly change the difficulty of the game on the fly is part of the game's core mechanic.

It seems to me that for this idea to really work, we need to exploit players' prior knowledge of what is meant by "difficulty", which means going for a very familiar game format where difficulty is intuitively understood, such as the combat genre. Here, everyone knows what difficulty means: how much health the bad guys have and how much damage they deal. For many games, it means a lot more than that, but this simple definition highlights our key challenge in making such a game: how can one make a player want to change the difficulty? In practice, players set the difficulty to match their skill so that they will be challenged but not overwhelmed. We need to completely rewrite that policy; providing strategic reasons to change difficulty, creating advantages and disadvantages to every difficulty setting that make each one favourable in certain circumstances.

We might assume that the inherent "advantage" of easy difficulty is that it includes weak opponents, so our primary concern is probably going to be with incentivizing high difficulty. A few suggestions:

• Enemies become specialized in hard mode – they should get armour or shields and start using weapons that deal special damage types. This way, the player can exploit the vulnerabilities of those special defences, and acquire resistance to the special attacks of these hard mode foes.
• Elements of the environment become more hazardous in hard mode, for both player and enemy alike.
• Random-spawned items like health and ammunition are more frequent in hard mode, so that hard mode can help resolve a shortage of a particular resource.
• The player has allies that scale to the difficulty, so that their best abilities are only active in hard mode.

Balanced well enough against the inherent weakness of easy mode opponents, the player should be shifting all the time! We can further complicate their decisions by making hard mode more rewarding (more XP, better loot, et cetera) so that hard mode is preferable when fighting weak enemies. Crucially, though, hard mode should be hard enough that the player doesn't always want to be in it. Alternatively, one could force the player into medium difficulty by default, and limit their ability to switch into hard and easy mode – for instance, they might have to hold down a button to maintain a difficulty shift (a dexterity challenge), or shifting the difficulty might consume a resource (an economic challenge).

A final thought: boss fights might entail special designs that play up the difficulty shifting. For example, a combat where some of the enemies explode when they die, and some of the enemies are incredibly resilient and can acquire healing powers in hard mode. In easy mode, the exploders can be killed rapidly to deal splash damage to the healers, but once they've all been detonated, the player needs to shift into hard mode so that the healers will resurrect the fallen exploders, allowing the player to then shift back down and repeat the effort.