Disc Room Designers on Granular Difficulty Options: Accessibility Helps Everyone

Mmo
Disc Room Designers on Granular Difficulty Options: Accessibility Helps Everyone

While Disc Dodger is a bloody difficult game, designer JW Nijman and staff chose not to be rigid about the challenge, acknowledging that what may be simply difficult for one person may be insurmountable for another. To that end, the Sawtooth Disk Dodger offers a variety of settings to fine-tune the challenge.

In a post on Twitter this afternoon, Nijman said the team considered many of Disc Room's accessibility concerns and explained how Disc Room tries to accommodate as much as possible while cutting you to the chase.

For one, you don't need too many buttons to play, and the buttons you use are customizable. To put a finer point on it, everything from game speed to individual disc and hazard speeds can be changed at any time. Or, the game speed can be kept the same and only the objectives can be made easier to accomplish. It is rare for a game to give the player so much control over the challenge, especially one in which the challenge is everything.

In addition to mechanical challenges, "Disc Room" also has visual settings to further expand accessibility. There are options to erase blood, change colors, and replace it with colorful confetti.

The focus on accessibility also extends to the cut scenes in the comic. Cutscenes have no text and can be changed so that they can be read in either orientation.

It is also possible to make the disk room more difficult. For example, you can end the game within 30 deaths, or not die twice on the same type of disc.

Discourse on difficulty is one of the recurring debates on the gaming scene, and Dark Souls is regularly held up as a banner of the sanctity of the developers' intentions regarding the game's difficulty. For Nijman, however, there is no question about it: the option opens the door to new players, and even the highest level players can benefit from tweaking the game's mechanics.

"Accessibility is about being helpful to everyone," said Nijman. Even the most hardcore players can use these settings to quickly unlock rooms they want to practice in, observe disc behavior, or come up with new speedrun strategies." Disc rooms are available for a wide range of players."

Tyler greatly enjoyed the disc rooms.

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