What is skill ceiling?
The skill ceiling is simply the upper limit of skill expression in a game or game mechanic.
A game or mechanic with a low skill ceiling is easier to master than one with a high skill ceiling.
The term describes the amount of time and energy a player could be expected to spend before they exhaust the possibility for improvement:
As a result, setting the skill ceiling is an important early consideration for any game designer and will help you determine their game’s intended audience.
What is skill floor?
In contrast, a skill floor is the lower limit of skill expression in a game or mechanic. Games with a low skill floor are easier to start playing than those with a high skill floor.
These ideas are often placed in the same framework, but it’s entirely possible (and sometimes preferable) to design a system with a low skill floor but high skill ceiling, or the inverse.
How to pick the right skill ceiling and skill floor for your game
Your goal is to adjust the skill floor and skill ceiling to make the game as fun as possible for its intended audience—so understanding that audience is the first step!
Making the skill ceiling too low may lead to players getting bored after quickly mastering the mechanics, but setting it too high risks making too much of the gameplay feel frustratingly unattainable.
Meanwhile, a low skill floor will make the game easy to jump into—which could be a negative experience for some, but is perfect for the more casual audience. A high skill floor can feel overly limiting and raise the barrier to entry—also not ideal, unless you’re making a Souls-like.
Player expectations are another critical aspect to factor into your design.
For instance, if a sequel has a drastically different skill floor or skill ceiling than its predecessor, this can end up frustrating the player base built around the first game:
Want to see how this all plays out in practice?
Here are some noteworthy games that cover the full range of skill floor and skill ceiling combinations, and how those choices worked out for each of them:
1. Animal Crossing (low skill floor + low skill ceiling)
While there are many mechanics in each Animal Crossing game that require some level of dexterity, pattern recognition or reaction speed, none of these systems are particularly complicated or hard to master.
These games are full of relaxing activities like bug catching, harvesting food, cooking, and hunting for things like artwork or fossils. Even fishing is a simple task:
Animal Crossing games are also incredibly easy for new players to learn, as they only require you to understand the basic movement controls and button layout. There’s minimal pressure to become more skillful.
Games with a low skill ceiling and low skill floor tend to be appropriate for all ages and are perceived as more of a casual experience.
2. Poker (low skill floor + high skill ceiling)
You’re probably already familiar with the “easy to learn, hard to master” nature of this famous card game.
There are numerous popular variations of Poker, but the basic rules governing the game are relatively straightforward:
Despite the endless combinations of hands you can form, it’s easy for someone to learn the basics with a quick explanation after one or two hands (rounds).
However, the top-level Poker players all have a firm grasp on both probability and psychology.
They can look at their cards, those on the table, and the other players’ body language to gather enough information to make a decision:
High-level Poker play is constantly evolving and shifting, so it’s almost impossible to tell how high the game’s skill ceiling goes.
3. Vampire Survivors (high skill floor + low skill ceiling)
At first glance, Poncle Games’ Vampire Survivors has a dizzying array of options and mechanics to learn.
The only inputs are movement controls, but understanding how various passive upgrades and weapons interact is initially impenetrable.
You also have to visually distinguish what’s going on in combat situations like this:
Vampire Survivors expects that players will need many failed attempts before their first completed run.
However, once a player understands the basics of the game, it’s very easy to beat it every time—meaning that it has a low skill ceiling.
4. League of Legends (high skill floor + high skill ceiling)
League undoubtedly has a very high skill floor and ceiling.
The game has over 150 champions to choose from at the time of writing, each with unique abilities and responsibilities that interact differently within their team:
Since it’s a 5v5 multiplayer game, besides learning the capabilities of their individual champion, players also need to know a great deal about their teammates’ and opponents’ champions for optimal play.
On top of all this, you still have to learn the general mechanics of the game…
- Last-hitting
- Jungle pathing
- Neutral objectives
- Map awareness
- Team coordination
With a large initial time investment and nearly infinite room for improvement, League is an indicator of the amount of work you’re signing up for with this ambitious design approach.
On the other hand, the harder it is to push a game to its limits, the more fulfilling that’ll be for the player.
Nothing can match the feeling of watching yourself do something in a game that you could barely comprehend when you started playing it.
If you want to make a high-skill-floor, high-skill-ceiling game, it’ll be a lot of work—but more than worth it when you see where the most dedicated players take your creation:
Skill ceiling considerations during game development
While it’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking that higher skill ceilings are inherently better, don’t forget to always keep your target audience in mind.
Games with high skill ceilings might attract a dedicated player base, but they can also deter more casual players who get stuck on your first level.
This is especially true when designing a multiplayer game. New players who are still learning the controls might be fighting veterans who’ve spent thousands of hours perfecting frame-perfect inputs, which tends to be demoralizing.
For example, this ProZD skit about fighting games is very relatable:
So, how do you create a high skill ceiling game that won’t alienate new players? With a carefully fine-tuned difficulty curve!
Managing your game’s difficulty curve
Tutorials are the most obvious way to introduce players to new mechanics.
A well-designed tutorial that introduces progressively more complex mechanics can ease players into very complicated systems in a (mostly) painless way.
Sometimes, the game nudges you along a path that automatically teaches you about its key gameplay principles, guiding you invisibly.
And sometimes, it’s faster to just hit the player over the head with clear instructions—like here, in Celeste:
However, this also requires that your game be designed with a ramping difficulty curve to match your tutorial (so players can chart their own progression, rather than feeling overwhelmed).
In adjusting this curve, you run the risk of creating overly simple and boring early levels or brutal difficulty spikes, so perfecting a difficulty curve requires a lot of thought and play-testing. (This is easier to accomplish in single-player games.)
Extra Credits has some helpful advice on how to make an effective tutorial—”the best example is, of course, Portal, which was 90% tutorial but so much fun that none of us seemed to notice”:
How multiplayer games adjust the skill ceiling and skill floor
In multiplayer games, skill-based matchmaking systems are commonly used to prevent one-sided matches.
These systems effectively cap the skill ceiling at the level of the player queuing. The goal is to always match players with roughly equivalent skill levels together.
Some multiplayer games make no attempt to match players based on skill, while others create elaborate algorithms to handle this task—like Fortnite’s complicated skill-based matchmaking system:
While useful, creating an effective skill-based matchmaking system comes with its own challenges, and should be used in conjunction with other methods of adjusting the game balance around players’ skill levels.
For example, each League of Legends champion has their own skill ceiling and floor.
The character designers at Riot Games carefully consider whether new champions are aimed at increasing the heights of professional play or creating a soft entry point for new players.
Having a large roster representing many skill ceiling/floor configurations can help players find both their comfort zone and room for growth, but it requires constant balancing.
The inverse is also true—many popular and successful games have notably low skill ceilings.
The lack of mechanical depth in Animal Crossing isn’t a bug—it’s a feature. The game isn’t designed to have intense, fight-for-your-life moments against terrifying tarantula hordes because it’s supposed to be a relaxing game appropriate for both adults and children.
How themes can affect the skill floor and skill ceiling
It would be totally valid (and funny) to make a brutally difficult Souls-like where you play as a cute, pink magical girl.
But, if most players who want to play as a magical girl aren’t looking to get good or die trying, they might enjoy the idea but skip the actual game.
On the flip side, many players looking for their next struggle session might overlook your cute, pink magical girl game because they don’t expect it to be what they’re looking for.
And that could be a grave mistake…
How to design around player skill expectations
In League of Legends, we consciously considered what player skill level each character was created for.
Garen was targeted at entry level players, while Aphelios was made for micro-heavy expert-level players.
Often, we did a great job of aligning these goals—but, occasionally, we missed the mark. For example, as mentioned by Riot August, when the rework on Xin Zhao was done, it was built in a way to increase the skill ceiling of the character:
But the result was to take a character who pretty much jumped on a target, pressed all of his buttons, then let the game do the work—and suddenly require much more careful thought to play them.
This caused a lot of the players who enjoyed him to drift to other, simpler characters.
And in Ori and the Will of the Wisps, the final boss fight with Kuro originally seemed like it might push the skill ceiling too far up:
Many people thought it would be too hard, but it turned out to be very beatable—it just requires a bit of creativity.
No other fight forces Ori to never land on the ground, but your toolkit is varied enough by this point that you can basically fly!
Placed earlier in the game, Kuro might have created some skill ceiling issues, but as a final boss in a game with so many movement and combat options, his challenge level is just right.
