There are a lot of questions about our game that we need to consider in our game design. A review of the questions in this section will help us gain an appreciation for the issues that even a simple game such as ours must contend with to achieve the desired difficulty balance.

This first set of questions are related to the overall implementation of difficulty in our game:

• Should we have different levels of difficulty, selectable by the player?
  • How many different difficulty levels should there be?
  • What will the difficulty levels be called?
  • What specifically will be different with each difficulty level?
• Should we have multiple game levels, each with an increased amount of difficulty?
  • How many different game levels should there be?
  • What will the game levels be called?
  • What specifically will be different with each game level?

Consider the following questions regarding the Cucumber Beetles in our game:

• How many Cucumber Beetles should there be?
• How passive or aggressive should the Cucumber Beetles be?
• At what distance should a cucumber beetle become aware of the Cucumber Man?
• How effective should the Cucumber Beetles be in finding cucumbers?
• How much damage should a Cucumber Beetle inflict on the Cucumber Man with each attack?
• How much damage can a Cucumber Beetle endure before it dies?
• Should Cucumber Beetles communicate and help each other in coordinated attacks?

This next set of questions refers to our playable character, the Cucumber Man:

• How many lives should the character have?
• How much damage will the character take from a single cucumber beetle attack?
• How much damage can the character endure before they die?
• Should the character be able to outrun Cucumber Beetles?
• Should there be a maximum number of cherries held by the character? If so, how many?
• Where should the player spawn? In a safe area?
• When the character loses a life, should they respawn without their cherries?
• When the character respawns, should full health be restored?

We also have cucumbers and cherries to account for in our game. Here are a couple of questions for each of those game assets that we will implement in our game.

Cucumbers:

• How many bites should it take for a cucumber beetle to consume a cucumber?
• How many cucumbers should there be in the game?
• Where should the cucumbers be located in the game environment?

Cherries:

• At what pace should the player be able to gather cherries?
• What will be the maximum number of cherries the Cucumber Man can have?
• How much damage will the cherries inflict on the Cucumber Beetles?
• How many cherries will be available in the game?

As you can see, there are several questions that we need to answer as part of our design. Some of the questions may seem redundant as they relate to more than one component in the game.