Mega Man Maker Level v1 Feedback (10/10/21)

 Mega Man Maker Level v1 Feedback


    Playtesters generally praised the level, liking the variety of enemies and structure of the level. They also liked my use of the background and tiles to fit the Western theme. Finding a background was easy, but I do feel like I reused the Guts Man tiles way too much. I did not expect so many people to find that a limitation though. Since the level was more of an exploratory-type level instead of strictly linear, people also liked the openness of it. Compared to everyone else’s levels, I thought mine was too easy and short, but luckily that seemed to be alright.
        Of course, since this is the first version, there were quite a few problems that got past me that the playtesters noticed. The first thing is the openness of the level. Technically, it is pretty good, but one crucial thing I forgot was to show the player where to go. The main route is going down and up in a horseshoe-like path, but it’s not like that was ever clear in the level. Some of the playtesters even got lost trying to backtrack. You could end up wasting time going down just to realize that the exit isn’t there and that you have to go back up. Another problem with the openness of it all was that there really wasn’t any bottlenecking of some sort. That didn’t cross my mind one bit while I was creating the level. Technically there’s the part in the beginning where if you fall in the second room, you’re stuck to that path, but that’s not really much of a bottleneck. If you fall down farther, there’s a room with a checkpoint. Coincidentally, I put the checkpoint in an area where you can’t jump up to where you came from, so if you went for the checkpoint, you have to go down the lower path (but they both lead to the same area anyway).
    One thing that a playtester pointed out was that there was no way to tell which way led to another room and which way was a wall. That is an easy fix (just block out the blank spaces with tiles). There was also one point where at the beginning of the level, if you fall down to the left, you can land on a bonus area. I wasn’t actually intending on that. The bonus area has a similar ledge you can fall off like the first one, so naturally you’d think you can fall off that one and be safe.
    Another small problem was with the enemies. This was the main thing I anticipated receiving feedback from playtesters since I really wasn’t sure how to place them. Most of the time they didn’t really pose a threat, but at the near end of the level, I did kind of a bad placement with Ben K. If you go in from the left side of the room, he is literally right in your face, and you’ll definitely find that unfair. If you go in from the right side of the room (or up the ladder on the right), you don’t actually have to fight him and if you dodge well you can just ignore him. A playtester suggested making him a requirement to fight for both sides. Seeing how much of a challenge he was on other levels I think I might just switch him out for someone else. Also in general, I think I will add in one more enemy per room because there are a lot of rooms with nothing in them or the enemies are too easy to dodge.

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