Håvard Christensen is the lead mobile developer at Tumbleweed Interactive. Personal opinions in this blog does not reflect the opinion of the company.

Frustration is not a pleasant feeling. Frustration makes us all feel angry and agitated. However, I belive frustration is sometimes needed to create a good challenge.  What you want from a good challenge, is to create a really great feeling when the player overcomes it. If the challenge is really easy, then you feel you didn’t accomplish that much. Not so exciting.

Bad frustration

There is a big difference in good frustration and bad frustration. I find that what frustrates me immensly is when after a challenge, I have to spend a lot of time to get into the challenge again. The worst offender in this camp, is cutscene nagging or silly loading.

Cutscene nagging is what I call it when you need to watch some giant cutscene to get to the interactive cool and challenging part where your skills are put to test, which after you beat, you’ll feel a rush of accomplishment-joy.

I remember the original Gears of War had a place where I experienced this and when I finally overcame that particaluar set-piece I was just glad that I didn’t have to do that bit of slow-walking while listening to some silly dialogue for the nth. time again.

Silly loading is another offender, but this is to me even more irritating. Take a racing game, where you just finished in fourth place and you are really hungry for victory, your thumb burning to press “retry race”. You press it, and despite the racing track having just been in memory with you racing around like crazy, the game decides it’s time to forget about that and reload the entire track so that you can sit back and enjoy the thrill of frustration hell.

I remember a video floating about on youtube on the loading of a sonic game for the xbox 360, it was just silly loading times, let me link to it: loading time

Loading frustration, loading it up in your brain, can you feel the frustration load? it’s heavy!

Good frustration

This is what I want. This is what I feel when I’m not hitting the ball with the right slice in ping pong. This is what I feel when falling over the edge in super monkey ball. This is what I feel when not making a turn in wipeout.

I feel frustration, but I also feel that I am the one to blame. I just need to play a bit better, just adjust my game, and then I will master it. I try again, I fail. I fail, and I get frustrated.

Then when I finally manage to overcome the challenge, I am in heaven. I’ve beaten it, I’ve done it. I did something hard, I accomplished something.

This wonderfull feeling of accomplishment is something you can’t get if the task is too easy.

In some games

This balance of frustration and challenge becomes core. The real heart of the game. This can be said for Mirrors Edge, which reviewers have complained about being frustrating, but also applauded for being very rewarding when it finally clicks.

It is also at the core of a game I’m working on here at Tumbleweed. A new game which should be out in not so many months. I am however aware that getting this balance right, getting it to feel hard enough to be a challenge worth overcoming, is something worth spending a few extra hours on getting right.

Wanna Test it?

This new game will need testers. If you want to test it and you live in the Hamar Area, please send an email to havchr@tumbleweedinteractive.com . Mark the email “Secret Cool Game” The playtesting will take place at 28th of November , from 12:00 to 20:00 , so you can drop in for playtesting during these hours.

This will be your chance to get to play the game, get some credits in the final version as a playtester and free cookies, crisps, etc.

Your input will be valuable to us to make sure we get the game as fun and challenging as possible. Hope to hear from you!