Difficulty modes
Oni's difficulty setting appears simple: a menu that lets you choose Easy, Normal or Hard. But the effects of each mode on the game are complex. As a general rule, increasing the difficulty means that enemies will be upgraded to tougher classes (e.g. green to blue, blue to red), will have more health and will fight harder. Konoko's health will also change on Easy. Read on for the exact changes at each difficulty level. Advice for modders who want to work with difficulty levels is found at the end.
Easy
Note that these factors apply to enemies, not Konoko, except for the player health factor. Also note that these changes are applied on top of the enemy class upgrades mentioned previously. Higher-level enemies have melee profiles which grant them better combat skills all around, including blocking and dodging attacks.
- Notice factor: 70% ("notice" refers to how often the AI notices an incoming attack and can consider blocking/dodging it)
- Block factor: 60%
- Dodge factor: 80%
- Weapon inaccuracy factor: 120%
- Enemy health factor: 100%
- Player health factor: 130%
Normal
- Notice factor: 100%
- Block factor: 100%
- Dodge factor: 100%
- Weapon inaccuracy factor: 100%
- Enemy health factor: 100%
- Player health factor: 100%
Hard
- Notice factor: 140%
- Block factor: 130%
- Dodge factor: 150%
- Weapon inaccuracy factor: 60%
- Health factor: 125%
- Player health factor: 100%
Engine information
The current difficulty level is stored in persist.dat. It's read with the BSL function difficulty() but can only be changed through the UI of the Options screen. (It's interesting to note that Oni's vanilla scripting never reads the difficulty level and uses it to change anything.)
See XML:ONCV for setting up enemy variants based on difficulty, XML:BINA/OBJC/MELE for melee profiles, and XML:ONGS for the factors listed above.