2D MegaMan Level v2 Feedback (10/18/21)

    During this playtest, it seems that I have done a lot better than last time (even though I didn’t really do much). I took into consideration what my playtesters said last time, and so I changed up a route in the middle of the map that would force people to take one path or the other. That would be my bottleneck, and I think that room was what made a bunch of people lost previously. Last time, it was just a really long ladder. Other than that, I changed around a few enemies, and made sure that it was obvious where you could and couldn’t go. One thing that I made sure of for this version (but was technically not noticeable) is that you can fall and not die. For example, in the very first room, you can fall to the left and be in another room. Previously the other room also had a ledge where you could fall off of, but that would mean death, so this time I blocked it off. Playtesters generally liked the level, but technically had less to say since it was just pretty good and there weren’t too many things to point out.

    In the room where you have to choose a different path, if you are on the bottom, you can’t jump up to the path where the ladder is, so you have to go right. One thing I noticed in the playtest is that technically, you can still reach the ladder just by looping around the map from the bottom to the top. I didn’t expect people to do that, but with my type of level design I suppose I still need to watch out for that. A playtester still told me that it still wasn’t very direct as to where you were supposed to go, but I thought the different path room would have solved that. At least it’s a lot easier to not get lost this time.

    I definitely still need to work on my enemy density because it’s still mostly pretty easy. I took out Ben K because he’s way too hard to deal with, and replaced him with a Big Eye. Funny thing is that if you just wait, he jumps high up out of the room and disappears, so you can ignore him pretty easily. I mainly just replaced a few dudes at the near end of the level because that’s really where I only got any comments to fix them. I think I’ll add some more floating enemies to the ladder rooms since the singular enemies aren’t that hard to deal with. I mainly wanted to make the enemies so that you didn’t really have to deal with them.

    I would say that the main problem with my level now is that it’s really short. Without the getting lost bloating up my level, beginners would go to the end much faster. Funnily enough one of my playtesters got to the end fairly quickly and was like “You probably need to put in more exploration.” (He took the shorter route.) I put doors at the checkpoints, but they were really meaningless. With an open level like mine, the doors are difficult to implement.

    The main thing I’d do to revamp this level is make more use of the doors. I was thinking of putting doors at the checkpoints and at the end. I want to make it so that the players would need to choose whether they want to use a checkpoint or get to the end, but I’m not exactly sure how I would be able to make that obvious to the player. I would probably have to put a bunch of keys everywhere.

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