Dynamic Difficulty Adjustment in Tower Defence

Abstract

Abstract When we play tower defence game, generally we repeat the same stages several times with the same enemies. Moreover, when the players play a stage that is ridiculously hard or way too easy, they would probably quit the game because it ismoderately frustrating or boring. The purpose of this research is to createa game that can adapt to the players’ ability so the difficulty of the game becomes dynamic. In other words, the game will have different difficultiesof levels according to the players’ ability. High difficulty levels will be set if the players use good strategy and low difficulty levels will be set if the players use bad strategy. In this work, we determine the difficulties based on players’ lives, enemies’ health, and passive skills (skill points) that are chosen by the player. With three of these factors, players will have varies experience of playing tower defence because different combination will give different results to the system and difficulties of the games will be different for each gameplay. The result of this research is a dynamic difficulty tower defence game, dynamic difficulty adjustment (DDA) document, and gameplay outputs for best, average, and worst strategy cases.