What I find most confusing is… I feel like there’s some kind of conservation of damage I take. I’ve gained little subtle bits of skill over the past month-and-a-half. I’m confident that I now have the ability to jump between two monsters that are coming at me from slightly different angles, where before I would have just had no ability to escape. I’m confident that I’ve learned how to “not accidentally jump” (I used to be very trigger-happy with the jump/bullet button, such that I’d accidentally jump up into a monster right above me).
But I kept… seeming to reach level 4 with roughly the same variation in “how much damage I took”.
My current best guess of what’s going on is a mix of:
It’s actually fairly cognitively demanding for me to play at my peak. When I do beat level 3 with full health, I typically feel like my brain just overclocked itself. So I think during normal play, I start out playing “medium hard”, and if I notice that I’m losing I start burning more cylinders or something. And if I start off playing quite hard, I get kinda tired by level 3.
But also, there’s a survivorship bias of “sometimes if I’ve taken damage I just give up and start over”, which may mean I’m forming an incorrect impression of how well I’d have done.
Really dumb question, but Downwell definitely does not do dynamic game difficulty balancing, right?
I don’t think so.
My current best guess of what’s going on is a mix of:
It’s actually fairly cognitively demanding for me to play at my peak. When I do beat level 3 with full health, I typically feel like my brain just overclocked itself. So I think during normal play, I start out playing “medium hard”, and if I notice that I’m losing I start burning more cylinders or something. And if I start off playing quite hard, I get kinda tired by level 3.
But also, there’s a survivorship bias of “sometimes if I’ve taken damage I just give up and start over”, which may mean I’m forming an incorrect impression of how well I’d have done.