How to Build a Difficult Mode in a Game

The difficulty of FTL is clearly by like deep obsession with everything but one thing that I found recently that I do think you to some extent did it into the breach although you didn't really flag it directly is I found that when you're letting players pick difficulty modes one of the things that is really jarring is picking something that is totally unclear. That's an entirely different way to approach difficulty and in some ways if that parameter can affect the scope of the problem that the player is trying to solve rather than the scale of punitive effect of it. Once you do actually understand what makes it harder you're actually building the difficulty in a way that is much more interesting than the number of lives because what