Level size

I'm wondering if there are some (in)official guidelines as to what's considered a small, medium, and large level - in terms of number of screens. I know a lot of people don't even fill in that slot in the world.ini file, but it's information I've always found useful, so I try to provide it - but I'm wondering where the 'borderline' between 'small' and 'medium' and between 'medium' and 'large' lies, approximately.

IMHO:

• small = under 100
• medium = 100 to 200
• large = 200+

But that's just my opinion. It's really up to the level creator.

Size is totally subjective. A level may have a huge number of screens, but have many of them be duplicates of other screens. Or a level might have a very few screens, but have so much in them that the level takes an hour to play through. There really aren't any official standards for grading a level's size- just tag your levels with the size you feel appropriate.

(Incidentally, I find it really, really irritating when people don't tag their levels properly. I have 121 pages of levels, and if I go to play a level, and then find out it's not tagged, and that the name it's filed under in the editor is different than the name in the .knytt.bin, then I have to dig for it. Which is not fun. Or go into the editor to play it. Which can be spoilery. The tags are there for a reason.)

Oh, yeah, I should have clarified: when I asked for a (rough) number of screens for various level sizes, I meant unique and playable screens. Obviously a level with five ground screens and a thousand screens of sky, or an animation utilising hundreds of shifts isn't 'large'. The player wants to know if s/he can play a level in their lunch break, not how big it looks in the editor. Back when I was still preparing for exams, I used seek out levels tagged as 'small' for short breaks to unwind between study periods...

I suggest you compare your levels' size to that of the official Nifflas levels. Other than that, in my opinion you should count as rooms any 'unique' room (i.e. not a single frame of animation) that is reachable by the player (yes, I think you should include the sky rooms you cited, as long as you can reach them). The reason is that I consider level size as indicative of the scale of the level, rather than its length.

Oh, yeah, I should have clarified: when I asked for a (rough) number of screens for various level sizes, I meant unique and playable screens. Obviously a level with five ground screens and a thousand screens of sky, or an animation utilising hundreds of shifts isn't 'large'. The player wants to know if s/he can play a level in their lunch break, not how big it looks in the editor. Back when I was still preparing for exams, I used seek out levels tagged as 'small' for short breaks to unwind between study periods...

When you try to figure out level length in time, that's where things start getting sketchy, because there are lots of factors. Some of these, such as player skill or how well-made a level is, are probably not going to be constant. For (an extreme) example , a Lunatic level with 40 screens will most likely take longer than an Easy level with 200 screens, simply because you're going to be spending 10 minutes or more on each of the insanely hard screens.

Yeah, obviously a hard level of a certain size is going to take longer than an easy level of the same size, and I'm not going to choose a hard level expecting to be able to play it in five minutes, even if it is tagged 'small'.

I was being imprecise in my wording - time is an important factor when I'm choosing levels, but since I play almost exclusively environmentals, the 'how many weeks ;-) am I going to have to try getting past that sequence of deadly traps' factor doesn't really figure in. In environmentals, 'small' tends to equate to 'short (in terms of time)'.

So... what I meant when I asked for a guideline for sizes was numbers of playable, non-repeating screens, really.