6.2    Player Strength

Give players options to power up their various abilities in the game.

One way of assisting the player is to enhance the elements they have control over.

If your game gives the player a certain amount of health, you could consider adding an option to increase this amount. Which might mean the player is able to make more mistakes before reaching a fail state in the game.

In Super Mario Odyssey using the Assist Mode doubles the amount of health you have, and also causes health to regenerate over time when Mario is not moving.

Going further than this you might decide to have an option to actually make the player invincible.

Enabling this option in Celeste will mean you can never reach a fail state however many mistakes you make, whether that’s by landing on spikes, or falling from a ledge.

There are any number of ways of increasing the power of the player depending on your game. You could increase the amount of damage a player deals for example, or the strength of their abilities.

FIFA allows the customisation of various aspects of the player’s strength. Such as increasing the shot speed of the user, so that all normal shots will now travel faster and be harder to defend against.

Perhaps your game has a stamina system that determines how long the player can sprint or climb. In a similar way to health you could increase the amount of stamina the player has.

In Celeste enabling Infinite Stamina allows you to climb indefinitely and means there is less pressure to climb in an optimal way.

If your game normally has a certain quantity of an item, you could include the option to increase the amount that’s available for the player to obtain. Or if the player has a certain count of an ability, you might allow the player to increase that amount.

Setting Air Dashes to Infinite in Celeste will mean you can dash multiple times where normally you would only be able to dash once per jump.

If your game has local or online functionality with other players, you might decide to make it possible to adjust the power of each player to try and balance out any skill differences between them.

Of course this won’t be suitable for all games and will need to be considered carefully on a game by game basis.

This module is a part of Assistance. Discover other modules in this topic on the SpecialEffect DevKit website at specialeffectdevkit.info.