In this devlog, we'll be looking at one of the biggest contributing factors to Mondrian's dynamic generation: Difficulty.

Mondrian - Plastic Reality has four difficulties: Relaxing, Easy, Medium, and Hard. Each of these is represented in-game by a variable: 0, 1, 2, or 3. In many games, the Difficulty setting usually just changes one thing, like the amount of HP enemies have. In Mondrian, the Difficulty setting changes just about everything.

The most obvious addition to the gameplay after Relaxing difficulty is the Gray Blocks. In Abstraction in Beauty, these blocks were indestructible, creating walled-off areas through which your ball could not travel. In Plastic Reality, they are destructible, but require multiple hits to eliminate. On Easy, they are gone in 2 hits; on Medium, 3; and on Hard, 4. A gray block's HP value is denoted in the game as difficulty+1. This allows for quick balancing and testing, and Mondrian Maker's Gray Flip functionality makes it super simple to add and remove gray blocks, depending on the selected difficulty. Because each level also has a variant per difficulty, playing on higher difficulties means more possible levels to play.

As in AiB, Relaxing levels have zero gray blocks, so they are very easy to get through. However, they also won't offer much in the way of high scores. Plastic Reality now introduces scaling rewards, also based on the current difficulty. On Relaxing, only gems worth 1 point will spawn; on Easy, gems worth 1 and 2 points; on Medium, gems worth 1, 2, and 3 points; and on Hard, gems worth 2, 3, and 4 points, a brand new addition to the game. This updated system to gems creates a Risk/Reward scenario. Good players can get 5-10 gems a round on Relaxing, but 40-50 gems on Hard.

Difficulty plays a significant role in Arcade Mode, where your return on spending 25 gems to stay in the game diminishes as the difficulty increases. On Relaxing and Easy difficulties, you get 3 lives for spending 25 gems. On Medium, you get 2; and on Hard, you only get 1. This can quickly become a game-killer on Hard, and may leave you choosing to submit your score early, rather than trying to go all 20 rounds. However, not losing a single life on Hard can potentially result in scores of thousands of gems. As they say in the Dark Souls community, git gud.

Lots of aspects of the game are also randomized based on Difficulty, like the chance for the ball to auto-aim at blocks after bouncing off another block or the wall. Some mechanics may seem like they're tied to Difficulty, but are actually tied to Game Speed, like the length of time of a Wall Lock (Game Speed can be adjusted from the Options menu).

With both Difficulty and Game Speed tied together in such systemic ways, Mondrian can be anything from an easy game to relax with for 10 minutes before bed; to an intense, competitive, lightning fast and hours-long arcade challenge with friends. From the day we began Abstraction in Beauty til now, our goal was to let you play Mondrian the way you wanted to play it, and that absolutely has not changed with Plastic Reality. Make Mondrian yours.

- Danny