But first!
The first level I designed was, ah,
Will's Grand Scheme. It's embarrassingly clear that it's the product of a 14-year-old's interest in making a video game, and while I could go into why, I feel that that may be for another time. WGS is a staggeringly linear level with only the slightest bit of backtracking, and was designed in much the same way - I very rarely did any editing or adjustment to previous areas, and I certainly never designed the levels out of order. I
think I had an overarching idea, but, well... it barely went past the playable level, even though I felt that WGS was "half" finished. My other somewhat-finished level that will never see completion,
Pouring, had a sequence of sets of challenges, with the idea being that the player could choose between multiple pairs challenge and get a different ending based on which they picked - so each separate pair was approached in sequence, and I would bounce back and forth between either one. Or at least, that was the idea.
This Level Plays Itself also had a linear design workflow, but this was mainly out of necessity due to its concept. My goal was to create a level in which the player would just sit back and let the movement automation do the work - so I had to make sure the movement automation
could do the work. As a result, the level was designed in the exact way it was meant to be played, and the stuff the level does is pretty basic.
Okay, right, so...
Deep Freeze is a vastly different matter. Initially, the first area I started was the first area, the second area was the second, the third, the third - I had kind of started on each area in sequence, and while I didn't finish each one completely before starting a new one, I didn't find this to be too poor of a method - nothing was written down, but, just through working on the level and identified what it "needed," I had very quickly and easily decided what the level's general powerup order would be - and this has been completely consistent through development, even to now. I had a good idea for the route the player would take, how things would play out, all that good stuff. I had a core goal for how I wanted the player to "feel" when they were traversing certain areas, and the general level design follows that sensibility. Designers like Nifflas tend to put a lot of extra filler into the level, to give the player lots of time to just explore and relax, and this is great! I, on the other hand, tend to really compress a level, so my level is very often offering some sort of challenge.
The real kicker was when I started having the level playtested, which you can read nearly 900 words about
here. I learned some very important lessons about pacing and formation of a difficulty curve, and my choice was to place two entirely new areas into Deep Freeze - so now the first area of the game was the second-to-last area that I'd started, and some area in the middle was the very last area to be conceived at all. After playing the level through the way it currently is, I really quite enjoy the variation the level has in terms of pace, and so I doubt any additional areas will be added.
So that's level design on the "macro" front - making sure the player doesn't get burned out by going from a puzzle area to another puzzle area, curving difficulty appropriately, all that good stuff. But what about the screen-by-screen level design? In Deep Freeze, there are puzzle, challenge, and filler screens. Filler screens may have a tiny bit of challenge in them, but they basically served as an area for the player to relax for just a moment. Some half-challenge-half-filler screens have been implemented after the fact, to help the player continue to feel like they're moving forward, rather than constantly start-stop-starting each screen. Puzzle screens are, as the name implies, screens with puzzles in them. There are many, many different kinds of puzzles that one can put into a video game, but
Deep Freeze strongly leans toward what I call "mechanical puzzles" - puzzles that center around mechanics already in place, that the player fully understands. I wrote a medium-length blurb on how I design those
here. When it comes to difficulty of puzzles, I generally have to observe what the player is and isn't seeing, and how I can make the layout present the puzzle's elements more clearly or more "obviously" - if necessary. "Difficulty" will generally take into account how many moving pieces there are. Reflex challenges are generally brought to the minimum possible in puzzle rooms, without making the puzzle too simple. Challenges are designed and tweaked in a fairly similar way, but they focus heavily on the player being able to form a plan and execute it in a timely fashion, so their difficulty is more tuned by reflex than anything else. If I can barely manage to make something work, I generally tune it to be a little easier. When it comes to ensuring the difficulty of these puzzles and challenges is not too obscene, I generally will take a two-to-four-week break from even looking at the screen in question and then go back and try to beat it. If I get stuck on a puzzle for too long, that indicates to me that its elements are clear enough. If die several times in a row to the same jump in a challenge screen, this suggests to me that it's
way too hard and should be toned down - after all, I'm trying to make a Very Hard level, not a Lunatic one!
Finally, there's the "middle" stage of level design. The level that's sort of between "macro" and "micro."
Deep Freeze has several intensely linear sections all throughout it that I refer to as "dungeons" (it's not really an apt term, but it's better than saying "linear section" over and over again). My macro and micro level design can sometimes be kind of haphazard, but when I start working on a dungeon, I absolutely
have to have an idea for what I want it to be like. What mechanic or idea do I want it to center around? Do I want puzzles or reflex challenges? How about a mix? In which direction do I want the player to be moving (up/down, left/right)? Any unique element I plan on using needs to be decided, because the first screen for a dungeon is
always an introduction to what kind of thinking the player should expect. I need to smoothly, carefully introduce elements so that any player, even one who isn't a KS veteran, can grasp what they can do, and what other things can do. The next part of the process is crafting a smooth difficulty curve, but with the improvisational way in which I sometimes craft screens, this can be a bit difficult - there are multiple times where I've had to slightly rearrange the order of screens because I felt that I made a screen that was too complex without properly priming the player to "think" the way I want them to for that screen. As I'm playing through a set of screens, I'll get a feel for how the flow should be for players of various skill levels, and I'll introduce screens that disobey the difficulty curve as I see appropriate. This is usually by easing up, but occasionally by really hammering in the challenge.