About The Project
My Honours project involved the exploration of Dynamic Difficulty Adjustment (DDA) and its use at improving a player’s enjoyment compared to pre-set difficulty settings in a simple FPS game. DDA is where a game will change how difficult it is depending on how well a player is preforming. For example if a player is doing very poorly and dying a lot, the game will recognise this and possibly lower such things as enemy hit rate, health and damage output to make the game easier. The opposite can also occur when a player is doing very well at the game, if this is the case then the game will become harder and pose a greater challenge.
The hypothesis of my dissertation was the use of DDA in an FPS game would make the experience a lot more enjoyable overall as opposed to the user selecting a difficulty setting (Easy, Normal, Hard).
As I theorised the experiment was a success, the vast majority of participants that took part significantly enjoyed an application which adjusted how well the player was doing.