A Health Point-Based Dynamic Difficulty Adjustment Strategy for Video Games

Abstract

Commonly, video games make a clear division on the difficulty offered (e.g. Easy, Medium, Hard), causing that players often do not experience what game designers intended. In this document, we propose a dynamic difficulty adjustment strategy for health point-based video games based on a heuristic evaluation performed at play time. This means that a video game may change its difficulty based on players’ performance while they play. To test our strategy, we implement a fighting video game and perform an evaluation with 10th grade students from Institución Educativa Multipropósito. Based on our results, the students considered that the game is balanced, suggesting that this strategy is a viable choice to implement and test in other video games.