The creation of the game has been finished with a total of 21 levels, with a total playtime of 8-45 minutes approx (Speedrun-Casual). Even though this isn’t a great amount of content. In my opinion it is for the time I had available. The only changes going to be made are tweaks.
Note: The final levels will be shown in a future post as well with a list of images of all 21 levels. Also by mechanics I mean something made for a purpose and by feature I mean something already made or not code related that is attach to a level, character or object.
To see how well I did with the level design I watched this video and the following list is me explaining if I did or didn’t do that and to what degree:
- Mechanics – In my opinion I have easily covered this area with a error or two here and there. My mechanics were really fun to use, with them altering other mechanics and objects.
- Goal of level(s) – I think with no doubt in my I have achieved this. The goal of every single level is to get from your location to the level_finish object, while maneuvering through a puzzle. I further enhanced this with a dialogue/help mechanics that I used as a level feature to give every level meaning and then further on give that voice a meaning. This gives each level 2 goals, 1 mandatory and 1 optional. The optional one is to learn what on earth is going on. Take Undertale for example: Seems like an ordinary game at the start, but when you look closer more mysteries show up.
- Teaching the player – I achieved this, but probably could have done better. I did teach the player ways to get around a level, what each mechanic does and why they should sometimes go backwards, but I don’t think I taught the player to think outside of the box that much.
- Simplistic puzzles and puzzle layout – I know these were two different points, but I think these go hand in hand. With the puzzle layout, I believe I did a good job, but there is probably room for improvement. The way I laid the puzzle out at the beginning made the puzzles simplistic, but later on more features and mechanics get added into the levels, which does make the levels a bit more crowded, but I don’t believe it got too complex.
- Learning from failure – By failure letting the player fail on purpose by deliberately pointing the player in the wrong direction, but making them think outside of the box for the actual solution. I didn’t really achieve this. I didn’t try to put any tricks in to make the player fail, but I did put some in without realising. An example of this is: The crouch feature being used to see the puzzle. I failed to do this in later on levels, because I wasn’t deliberately trying to make the player fail, but I did however make a few obstacles that made the player rethink about how to beat a puzzle, in short I did and I didn’t achieve this; I’m somewhere in the middle.
- Player feedback – The player feedback in the game was good, but not fully good. The feedback the player got was all well with sound and not too annoying/painful to listen to, but I didn’t have much visual player feedback. I did have some, but not a lot.
- Building on top of levels – I don’t think he meant literally building on top of levels, but the act of gradually increasing the difficulty and mechanics/features into the level.
Overview
I may not have made the perfect puzzles, but throughout all the levels the one thing that did stay the same was level consistency. I am proud of what I have achieved, even though I believe I could do better, because I probably always better and will always try, at least in the work I like, which is this.
The one thing he didn’t mentioned about puzzle design, probably because it is more of game design was:
- Fairness – I think this is a difficult goal to achieve fully, but believe I have done this reverently close to how the player would want it. I have always kept in mind about helping the player, but not too much it’s too easy,
In the future projects I do puzzle designs I will re-watch this video.
Game Growth 