Employing Soft-Body Dynamics to Gradually Escalate Difficulty Levels in 2D Platforming Games : A deep dive into soft bodies in the Godot engine

Sammanfattning

While designing games, finding and utilizing balanced methods to challenges playersis a hard and time consuming task. This study aims to give insight into the use of softbodies and further increase developers arsenal of methods for finding the perfect balancein their games. The study consisted of creating a 2D platforming game in the Godot enginewith the use of soft bodies as platforms and accompanying methods to automatically adjustthe softness of said platforms, and see how this affected the difficulty and the impact onexperience. A remote experimentation was conducted where participants played the gameand answered a form. The result showed that an increase in softness in the soft bodies increased the difficulty, and the majority of participants did not think it had a negative impacton the experience. However, some participants thought that too much softness disruptedthe game play and made the game feel sluggish. This may be mitigated by increasing theelasticity to keep the momentum and flow, while still maintaining the unpredictability andenjoyment of the soft bodies.