Post by SplitHare in What Goes Up jam comments

Game Maker's Toolkit Jam 2018 » Entries » What Goes Up

Viewing post in What Goes Up jam comments

This is hands down my favorite game that I've played so far. Everything about it is so well done. All the levels feel so clever and well thought out. I have no idea how you had time to make so many of them. The animations are fluid and just plain great. As a fellow mouth noiser, I commend you on you excellent exhalations. I literally laughed out loud at the end.

If I had to find one fault with it, it would be that the difficulty curve is all over the place. There are levels that I had to spend several minutes puzzling over that are immediately followed up by levels that I just blitzed through. On the one hand, it kinda gives you a break after racking your brain, but on the other, it makes the follow-up levels feel too easy.

Like Reply

Arakade5 years ago(+1)

I completely agree but, y'know, the 'ideal' interest curve isn't a continuous line from bottom left to top right. I'd be fascinated to know how much this was accident vs. intention!

Like Reply

SplitHare5 years ago

I realized as I was typing it out that the easier levels do serve as sort of a break, but it's a balancing act. I think the difficulty in this game was still a little too spikey for me.

Ideally you probably want to have an ever-rising trendline of difficulty that sort of averages out from level to level when you have something really challenging followed by something that feels more forgiving. You don't want to have the hardest bit in the middle of the game flanked by the easiest bits, but providing a little variance definitely keeps it more compelling.

Like Reply

Lonebot5 years ago(+1)

hey, i'll shine some light on the matter!

i'll admit the level order of the levels isn't perfect; designing levels was the heaviest task of this jam - about half of the development time went into creating all the different rooms - but the time we had for determining the order of the levels was much shorter (less than an hour).

we definitely wanted the levels to have some fluctuations in the difficulty curve, exactly for the reason you've stated - as a means to keep player engagement high - 'rewarding' the player with some easy levels after a very hard one makes them feel less tense and gives a more powerful sense of progression (which are both important for jam games).

i completely agree about the hard levels though, the spike is too big. the way i'd solve this is to tone down these harder levels, make them a bit easier to solve, with hints like visual cues or a more refined room layout (level 16, which a lot of people get stuck on, would've greatly benefitted from such changes).

all in all i'm happy people are taking notice of this problem, and we'll make sure to give it more thought next time :)

Like Reply

Arakade5 years ago

Thx for replying. Great stuff. Level design is the part I find hardest and ironically was planning to focus on so choose myself an 'way to implement' game. Sadly I only got 1/3 time I expected so didn't get to exactly that part!

Can I ask how you/your team go about designing levels? Always fascinated to learn and yours were just superb.

Like Reply

itch.io

Viewing post in What Goes Up jam comments