still writing
Oh I forgot to post something yesterday...and today. I will post it today.
finished those last idea things...though I'm sur eI could just keep making more. we'll see. now I have to attempt arrangement, which is taking these ideas and putting them into logical orders with the right number of checkpoints in between...I think that 30-40 rooms per gauntlet should work pretty well, but we'll see. (A room is a mostly-isolated set of challenges or design ideas for the player, a base example is a room with exit and entrance containing one spike to jump over.)
My plan atm is: Intro I - Intro II - Separate (more complex) - Combined (Medium rooms) - Combined (Large rooms)
Intro I and II are showing uses of the two entities mostly alone. We actually show them BEFORE the gauntlet, too, but that's slightly different. Separate/more complex are uses of the entities, alone, but perhaps with helper entities (wind, water, spikes, etc) in slightly more complex scenarios. Combined is combining the two in different rooms sizes.
I try not to use spikes so much as cheap instant death, but as "movement dissuade-rs" or "carelessness preventers". E.g., as a "movement dissuader" It's hard to non-awkwardly prevent a short horizontal stretch of floor from being traversed (I could place wind, but it's just awkward usually). However, there's a short design idea i want to demonstrate by requiring the player to take the short top path (this is slightly forced and non-layered level design, but sometimes it's necessary for showing basic ideas.)
but with a few spikes, this makes the bottom path immediately a less desirable path than going through the top route, however, it's still a slightly faster route for the more experienced player.
Spikes are sometimes used in rooms that i want to prevent wall scaling. There's another option (tiles you can't climb up), but Im trying to save those for later. It's a trade off between spikes and making the level geometry slightly more awkward in order to be climbable with difficulty.
As for "carelessness preventers" , this is generally just where brute forcing a room would make it easier to miss the design idea. One example is:
Here, you can see the spikes at the top. Without them, you could easily hop on the water shooter (the white thing below) to go to the button which moves the 'raisewall' (the blue horizontal 32x16 thing) , making it easier to leave the room through top-left. With the spikes, then you have to learn a bit more about horizontal movement while on one of the things the water shooter shoots (in this case, this one shoots 2 things, one at a lower vertical velocity: you can time it right to get on the slower one to catch the wall on the right, or be more risky and run and try to miss the spikes at top. Of course, if you're clever or fast you can wall jump up the left side with more white to help.
And even if you hit the spike, because death isn't instant, you could hop down to the white pod at the bottom right to save yourself.
I generally plan to put the more easy-to-die rooms at the beginning of checkpointed sections, and I don't have many of the easy-to-die rooms.
Every now and then I throw in entity-less or non-idea rooms because those can be fun.
That's just a rough plan though. It's hard to say what the final will be.
To me, I don't think any of the rooms are particularly difficult, but presenting them in a more logical order makes arranging a heck of a lot more easy.
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