You have to have seen the entire level at least once in order to orientate yourself. I myself usually need several passes from different directions for a good orientation. A medium complexity ensures a good game depth without frustrate the player. I think Zortch does that very well. I only had one moment of frustration, I think it was E1M3, it took me 30 minutes to understand that I have to blast a wall - it was definitely my fault. I like it when there are shortcuts in the level or when you find a key and you are guided to the right door on a different path, I had a lot of such moments in Zortch. At the end of the day, this type of game is a kind of "open world" and the player doesn't always follow the tracks that the level designer intended. For me it was a solid gaming experience.
I'm glad you liked it!
I guess it was a good idea to not make it bigger after all - the plan was to make this extremely large multi-level prison and I was considering to remake the whole thing to that at one point 🤔
(and the minefield was a long snake-ish looking canyon - turns out going for a realistic area scale is not a good idea 😔 )
I just hope so a next levels(At next projects) be still relative big.
Personally I like current scale, smaller levels requires seamless connection and/or backtracking to give comparable impression.
Honestly I am a big fan of huge levels with backtracking in metrodvinia style. (Secret-hunting in addition to reactors/card unlocking with big levels give that feel for me in Zortch without really be metrodvinia)
yes it's seems I'm at a sort of crossroads
there are people who love big maze levels with secret hunting and seem to be equally as much who prefer linear ones
with 60 fps I managed to make everyone mad: some people want 120fps and for many it gives sea sickness
and also the 5 usd price is too much for some, too little for others
so far it seems the safest way is to not to complete projects at all as doing so only leads to never ending feature requests 🤔
Hmm, I have no success to give advices, and can't make just single game because beat myself by feature creep.
But IMHO:
For single player game, it's no too hard to use variable timestamp or as dirty way just use smaller phys-timestamp and accumulation. It's give some notable fps spikes with low fps, but I think satisfy more peoples. (Except with really potato PC)
Price, hmm, as people from country with expensive dollar I can told so $2 or $5 makes almost no difference rather than just a free game :P
By my observation, most peoples just buy or pirate game regardless of $2-$5 price...
And as noticed by some devs on steam, yes cheaper games get more sales, but it's give no more profit without being random viral.
And about level size: I think best option to just do what You like yourself enough happy to continue development without burning. As Your current style really fun and unique enough for me and i hope for many more people with steam release. (it's still 26 review at now, but it's still 100% good! And I can remember a lot of steam release with far worst results even at couple of years from release)
so far it seems the problem was that the gpus where it occured tried some battery saving maneuver - there used to be some old code you had to add to games for them to be recognized as high perfomance (NvOptimusEnablement etc) but these new video cards seem to ignore it 😔
it's just that I seen some complaints they thought it was a bad game because it was cheap 🤔
(mainstream tactic seem to be to make the price +5 bucks and just reduce it on sales but that seemed to overcomplicate things for me - like why bother if people only want to buy stuff on sale - let it be always on sale - and as usual with my grand ideas it is met with confusion)
Indeed, I'm quite humbled by the response so far - now I feel I should have spent more time on the game and have made a much better and bigger one 😔
Your game is much more balanced, stable and polished (and fun) than every AAA title released this year. People (including me) have ideas and suggestions because they love the game, otherwise they wouldn't care. Also, I don't think any point of it is really relevant.
Nobody expects to change the level design now. Optional changes are always cool. I can imagine that 60fps on a 144Hz monitor looks worse than on a 60Hz monitor because it doesn't quite add up. This is a very exhausting topic to juggle game ticks, control timing and optional vsync.
I still have a list of things I would change but I have a feeling you take it as criticism. I will keep spreading the word. I've already "spammed" my subscribed Discord channels. So let's celebrate the Steam release and the positive reactions! 🥳