>>20647370Okay, so, I wanna talk a bit about route 1 and our maps/difficutly in general. As a project, gameplay wise, we have 3 goals:
1. Make it feel like an actual pokemon game, while improving on the formula
2. Have it be fun
3. Have it be challenging.
I think a lot of people are confused as to what that all means, especially in regards to difficulty. Fun and Difficulty are not mutually exclusive. It is possible to have something be challenging and hard, and still having it be fun even for the non hardcore masochists.
Likewise, difficulty does not equal frustrating, annoying, grindy, or tedious. Me folding my laundry is easy as shit, but it's annoying and tedious to do, and it's not fun. A more pertinent example: Me fighting against 1-2 higher level trainers, with good EV's and IVs, and good movesets might be CHALLENGING, but it's not TEDIOUS or grindy because those are just two challenging encounters. However, 15 wild encounters with pokemon 10 levels below you that only know bite, spark, etc, isn't hard at all, they'll all go down in one hit, but it'll be annoying as shit.
That said, a lot of challenging encounters can become tedious or frustrating more easily then easy ones because of them being more difficult. So 5 challenging fights in a row is more frustrating then 5 easy ones.
All of that said, I think a general rule of thumb we could say is that the number of encounters is far more impactful on how frustrating something is then how hard those encounters are. Again, if I have level 100 pokemon, and all the pokemon on the route are level 1, it'll be easy, but if I have to go through 10 trainer battles and 15 wild battles to get through it, it's going to feel artificially grindy or boring or frustrating because every few steps you get put right back into battle, even if that battle lasts only a single turn.
1/3
