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Dustin Smith
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« Reply #40 on: July 08, 2010, 10:29:01 PM » |
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« Last Edit: July 08, 2010, 10:35:25 PM by TheDustin »
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Jonathan Whiting
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« Reply #41 on: July 08, 2010, 11:22:10 PM » |
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You've made yourself an extremely elegant set of levels there. There's a bit of unecessary usage of physical space in the first few levels (for sake of example, level 3) but the 'idea space' for every puzzle is very clear and distinct. They are far from banal. Level 9 in particular is a beaut'. This is exactly what the excercise is about, distilling the core game-y ness of a level to its simplist form. Once you understand the building blocks it's much easier to make compelling larger forms out of them. In case anyone's wondering I'm currently planning the next exercise to be about that (putting the building blocks together). |
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Supermini_man
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« Reply #42 on: July 09, 2010, 05:48:15 AM » |
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« Last Edit: July 09, 2010, 07:49:22 AM by Supermini_man »
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Noel Berry
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« Reply #43 on: July 09, 2010, 06:18:54 AM » |
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NB: As a note on criticism generally, as we're all trying to learn and improve our craft criticism is very important. Providing quality critique is at least as useful for learning as recieving it, so try and do some. To be most effective it needs to be honest, verging on brutal, so I won't pull any punches, and nor should you. Just try not to take it too personally  Was that directed at me? If so, I probably should have expanded my post. What I meant was that it was really tricky and a hard to figure out puzzle, which for such a small playing area, was done really well.  I'll try to make some levels tonight, when I get home from work  EDIT: whoops, was unaware NB stood for anything. I've been referred to as that (initials of my name). My bad |
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« Last Edit: July 09, 2010, 08:32:54 AM by Noel »
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HybridMind
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« Reply #44 on: July 09, 2010, 07:05:51 AM » |
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When is this first task due? I know there is no hard deadline but if you had a time frame in mind it would help with all the crap I'm juggling. I've been avoiding looking at the submitted levels until I maybe have a chance to make some.
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Jonathan Whiting
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« Reply #45 on: July 09, 2010, 08:35:35 AM » |
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Cool idea. I just made four for now (I actually made a fifth, but it was dumb so I scratched it).
The 2nd and 3rd could really do with some serious editorial snipping, both could be way smaller and cleaner without losing any gameplace. I realize I keep banging on about this, and I understand that it might feel a bit irrelevant, but I really feel that being able to cut a level back to its bare essentials is a really useful skill. The 1st, and 4th are pretty good, the puzzles work, and they're fairly slim too. It does appear you're generally putting a bit too much emphasis on the visual appearance of the levels rather than the underlying form though. I don't want to discourage this *too* strongly, because level aesthetics *are* very important in keeping larger scale level design fresh. It is important to know when you are compromising the levels functionality for purely aesthetic reasons (I dislike the immovable boulder in the 1st level). NB: As a note on criticism generally, as we're all trying to learn and improve our craft criticism is very important. Providing quality critique is at least as useful for learning as recieving it, so try and do some. To be most effective it needs to be honest, verging on brutal, so I won't pull any punches, and nor should you. Just try not to take it too personally Was that directed at me? If so, I probably should have expanded my post. What I meant was that it was really tricky and a hard to figure out puzzle, which for such a small playing area, was done really well. No no, wasn't intended to be directed at anyone in particular. It was just a general comment that I realized I'd not made previously. Mostly I just wanted to explain why I was about to starting beating on peoples designs. I'll try to make some levels tonight, when I get home from work Excellent! When is this first task due?
I think I'm going to aim to do these weekly, it seems the right sort of balance between being regular enough to stay interesting, yet with enough of a gap that I won't end up burning out really quickly. So, exercise 2 will hopefully begin next Thursday. Now that there's a good handful of sets out I'll add mine to the fray. I do stand by my earlier comment though, the exercise will be most productive if you go into it blind. Check everyone else's out *after* you've finished your own. IIIIIIIVVVIVIIVIIIIXXPlease rip them to shreds! I'm about to head off for a long weekend, and will be offline till Tuesday evening. So don't be discouraged by my lack of responses for the next few days. I eagerly anticipate working through what you've all come up with in the meantime. |
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Nitro Crate
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« Reply #46 on: July 09, 2010, 09:34:39 AM » |
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I played through a couple people's last levels. (Don't exactly remember everyone's but..) I have to say, I really liked TheDustin's level 9. I can't really pin point it, but it felt nice in both aesthetics and puzzle. Spoiler: I could argue that some of the aesthetics were part of the puzzle. The boulder all the way on the right side is just there to throw you off really, but the level also looks more 'complete' with it there.Bacon, (first off, thanks for the compliment :D) I felt like your level 10 was kind of repetitive. After moving like the 7th block I just lost interest in it. The absence of outer walls also seemed to ruin the puzzle a bit since I could just go off screen when I needed to. (Although, that may just be a bug with the program and not a fault of your own.) Now this is just my opinion (and i'm a newb at this, so take what I say with a grain of salt), but I think it'd help if you minimized the amount of blocks to what's only absolutely necessary for the 'puzzle'. Edit: I had to look up what NB meant because it totally threw me off.  |
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« Last Edit: July 09, 2010, 09:45:01 AM by Nitro Crate »
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baconman
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« Reply #47 on: July 09, 2010, 10:09:17 AM » |
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Ahh. I guess I ignored the focus on minimalism; my bad. What I was trying to do with my levels was provide a variety of experiences and goals, rather than just one. One level, for instance, was simply about navigating a single boulder though a simple maze. I also designed my levels with unobvious ways for people to screw themselves up, and wrong choices that they were totally free to make/attempt. Well, maybe not levels 1/2, but that's the "get the feel of it levels," they're SUPPOSED to be easy, but still somewhat engaging. The last level was intended to purely be an unexpected twist, so that people playing them in sequence wouldn't ever expect that. And admittedly, I didn't anticipate screenwrapping, or I would've been much more vicious in abusing that, too. |
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Captain_404
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« Reply #49 on: July 09, 2010, 11:54:34 AM » |
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Crits, yo! Don't take anything personally, I don't mean to offend. Level 1, while (perhaps?) necessary, is boring and manipulative. There are better ways to present the idea that it is possible to move and push blocks. The block out to the side is a little confusing too, I think. You've given it visual significance by isolating it from the playfield, but it is in fact irrelevant. 7 and 8 are both really clever! I'd encourage you to go ahead and round out the ten, as the game only really gets interesting in your last two levels. Bacon 3 could use a bit of polishing, I felt that there was some unnecessary space there. (although hooray for tetris!) Bacon 4: couldn't the two spaces beneath the horizontal wall of two blocks in the middle be blocked off with no ill effect? Why is that space there? Bacon 5 plays like two puzzles that just happen to share the same map. The balls never get in each other's way from a gameplay perspective, and their symmetry doesn't seem to serve much aesthetic purpose either. Bacon 6 is good. Are you aware that in Bacon 7 you can just go straight right and then straight down? Bacon 10! Checkers! Yay! Overall, it seem that in your level design you equate lengthiness with difficulty. The path to the goal was always pretty straightforward. Try thinking about how moving one block will interfere with moving another, how the solution to one puzzle in a level will interfere with the solution to another puzzle in the same level. The checkers board is the closest to achieving this. Make more levels, you bum! Most of Eight felt really unnecessary to me. Most of the blocks in the level can't even be moved, not to mention all that empty space which the play will never tread (not talking about the outside here). Nine and ten are good. Remember that the early levels can be used to establish habits of play, discouraging certain solutions and encouraging certain kinds of recklessness. If you set up your early levels right, it can make the later levels that much harder. Level 1 can be cut down a tiny bit. The top part of Level 3 felt pretty useless. Level 6 had me fooled at first, good job! Overall, these level are great. There are a few spots you could touch up here and there, but not many. Level 9 is brilliant! Not sure how I feel about that block you can't move in 1. It suggests symmetry where the level solution is actually asymmetrical. If the solution were also symmetrical I could justify it, but as is the whole upper part is just wasted space. Overall, these puzzles are a nice start, but are incomplete. The puzzles you have all seem very similar to each other somehow. Perhaps when you develop the ideas you've started here into a full ten levels I'll be able to better speak to that. Grudge match! (though thanks for your crits, they're spot on) I is boring. Nobody wants to press a button to win. Because the player starts right next to the block and has nowhere to move but towards the block, it makes it appear as though pressing the right arrow causes the person and block to move in tandem with each other, as though they were a single entity. (a lesson which is reinforced over the first move of your second level). I actually think your second level is a better first level, as it teaches the player all the directions they can move, it establishes the block, player, and goal as separate entities, and it is much harder to win by randomly mashing buttons. You had me convinced that VIII was impossible, so I skipped it. Then I openly wept. Your last three levels are great (though I might argue that IX is the exact same as VIII, but lengthier), but the earlier levels didn't engage me as much. I, II, and III could all be condensed into a single level with no ill effect, and level IV-VII all revolve around the same basic principle (the order in which you do things). Individually, the levels are well made, I don't think I found anything that needs to be removed. As a whole, however, your ten levels present about four ideas. -- Seems someone finished another set while I was typing. FYI, I'm not trying to ignore your set, NiallM. I'll try to come back and give more feedback once a few more sets pile up. |
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HybridMind
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« Reply #50 on: July 09, 2010, 12:37:07 PM » |
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My Sokoban Levels: OK So I took a couple hours here to design some levels. I included my brief design notes but feel free to not read those ahead of time. I have never played much Sokoban and feel that if I had played more (and I can't wait to play everyone else's levels) I would have more ideas. That is one thing that really stood out to me about this process is that the more one is familiar with the mechanics and possibilities of the game the better chance you'll have on crafting a level intelligently. Oh yeah.. DAMN I WISH THE GRID WAS 11x11 not 10x10...  drove my OCD mad not being able to center anything. Hehe. Level OneLevel TwoLevel ThreeLevel FourLevel FiveLevel SixLevel SevenLevel EightLevel NineLevel Ten- Level One Design Notes: The barest concept
- Level Two Design Notes: Still a safe level introducing the direction change
- Level Three Design Notes: First level you can make a wrong move on and introducing the shuffle.
- Level Four Design Notes: An experiment with grid based shuffling.
- Level Five Design Notes: More advanced shuffle using three stones and many ways to go wrong.
- Level Six Design Notes: Figuring out another mechanic here.. this one could be refined a lot more.
- Level Seven Design Notes: Another test of stone juggling between rooms and having the player move stones away from nearby goals.
- Level Eight Design Notes: More experiments with loading / shuffling.
- Level Nine Design Notes: Wanted a visual tear drop and checker pattern to see how it played.
- Level Ten Design Notes: Iterated on this one for a bit--still not very happy with it.
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« Last Edit: July 09, 2010, 12:49:33 PM by HybridMind »
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Zaratustra
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« Reply #51 on: July 09, 2010, 01:37:32 PM » |
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lv1lv2lv3lv4I don't like how these came out. making more later
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Draknek
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"Alan Hazelden" for short
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« Reply #53 on: July 09, 2010, 04:46:57 PM » |
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Focusing on people who've not had so many comments. First bunch are boring, but do demonstrate your idea of starting with the absolute most basic situations possible. Intellectually I can see there might be an advantage to explicitly finding and storing building blocks like that for future use but emotionally I just can't bring myself to create levels with trivial solutions. VI is boring and doesn't seem to demonstrate anything. VII is decent. VIII is excellent; so simple and yet had me briefly questioning if it was possible. IX is trivial after VIII. X also does a very good job of subverting expectations of what the right move is. Levels 1-3 gave me a sense of deja vu (having played too many levels of sokoban over the last hour or so) but are decent. Level 4 is either impossible or very hard. Level 10 looked like it would be more interesting than it was. I was hoping for an interesting puzzle and instead just stumbled across the solution. Levels 4 & 8 are more tedious than interesting. Level 9 is fairly uninteresting. There's too much safe space: you can recover from pretty much anything. Level 10 is okay for packing the blocks into the target zone but again there's too a lot of free space when you're just moving them about. Others are decent. lv1lv2lv3lv4I don't like how these came out. making more later Level 1 has so much free space that it's just not interesting after having played all this Sokoban already. I like level 3, there's a nice moment of working out which is the block you need to push inwards. Level 4 is the same as level 1? |
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Almost
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« Reply #54 on: July 09, 2010, 05:35:23 PM » |
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Nitro Crate's new puzzles:
nice puzzles, though difficulty curve is still weird. Levels 1 and 2 have almost no way to lose, and then level 3 is complicated and open ended enough to be fairly difficult.
I like level 4 for it's simple premise and elegant solution.
Bacon: Bacon
Repetition (see last level) and size of puzzle do not cause difficulty of puzzle.
Captain404 I liked level 2. It made me as a player question my assumptions about the game and even though the solution is obvious, it's fairly satisfying to discover.
A bunch of your other levels are pretty cool. Simple designs that still cause the player to think.
Superminiman your level 2 is a very nice introduction to the order matters principle. level 3 seems way too large for such simple puzzle mechanics that it has. Also, the fact that your design allowed me to go off the left of the screen initially caused me to believe it would be a trick puzzle and that would be necessary, but it wasn't. Level 4 is good for being a minimal puzzle.
Jonathan Whiting:
I-III are painfully simple. just because they are more complicated movement doesn't mean they're more complicated solutions. Most of your levels were fairly easy until suddenly level VIII which was amazing. I tried the same incorrect solutions over and over until I deemed it impossible, skipped to IX and then realized it was possible after all. After solving VIII, IX was super easy.
X is a good level.
NiallM
Nice levels. In particular, the first half of the levels all seemed very distinct. they presented interesting puzzles in simple ways, which I like. In particular, level 4 made me stop a bit to think about it; the shape of the level makes the solution less obvious, which I think is a good thing.
The later levels seemed more of the "same old". Level 10 seemed to be drawing on the "large level is complicated to think about". The puzzle part of it was nice, but it seemed to have a bunch of unnecessary space meant simply to "fool" the player. I guess that's probably what you were going for though.
Hybrid: level 1 is boring, even for a simplest level. It doesn't teach the player the rules, but rather it says "that is a win". If the player already knows how to play, he would be bored by it. If not, he probably still doesn't know. Level 2 is better as a how to play level.
Levels 2 and 4 are good. I like 7 because it forces the player to move a boulder off of a goal. Levels 8 is not vary hard other than that it's easy to mess up. Level 9 is unfun. It can be solved in many ways. Basically, it has enough open space that you can start by pushing at random and then simply tweak to solve. It's a long level that looks as if you simply drew a picture, tested that it's solveable, and moved on. Level 10 provides no new mechanics, and is again simply a large/long level that isn't too hard.
Zaratustra:
lolol levels 1 and 4 are the same.
sorry Draknek, haven't played yours yet. Brain says too much sokoban; every level feels the same now.
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agj
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« Reply #55 on: July 09, 2010, 05:42:04 PM » |
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Really liked Captain_404's and his specific use of this implementation's characteristics. Also just plain smart levels. I haven't played many others; will in a bit. My levels are below. I'd like to say that I have a bit of experience designing puzzle game levels; I most fondly remember making levels for Polarium and Chu Chu Rocket. - Tutorial- Roundabout- Ping pong- Wall- Rubble- Scatter- Combination lock- Secret- Minefield- Cage- Torn- Separate ways- LibertineFor these levels I went with a fairly psychological point of view for the first few (Tutorial shows symmetry that is broken by a solved boulder, which pushes the player to reach new symmetry by imitating the movement in the other directions), and then an aesthetic point of view, which is how I tend to design levels (from Wall onwards, mostly; I set out to create interesting geometry). The latter levels were totally aesthetic in their conception, of course, and none is solvable; they present metaphors or just simple jokes by use of the game's space and rules. I used the level names to highlight what I got from them (which is mostly how it was, rather than naming them first and then trying to make the level fit that name). When you have such a delimited set of rules, it's easy to interpret certain states as an abstraction of a much more complex situation. Ideas for games/editors to feature in the future: - OmniLudiCon- Blackflip (Flash Polarium clone) |
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« Reply #56 on: July 09, 2010, 06:11:53 PM » |
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... Ideas for games/editors to feature in the future: - Blackflip (Flash Polarium clone) Man, I made a bunch of levels for blackflip ages ago; it's a good puzzle game. Though It'd probably be better to have not-just-puzzle-games in this workshop. |
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agj
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« Reply #58 on: July 09, 2010, 07:33:09 PM » |
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JW, I feel that III should have gone before II; III teaches you to push laterally, and II teaches you that you can't pull (which is a step more complicated an idea, I feel). Your last one is pretty fiendish. NiallM, I like how some of your levels have clearly defined 'loops'. Makes those levels feel a bit like one's going on tracks. HybridMind, the quality I like about your levels is that many of them are not straight-forward, they do require you to do things in a backwards way. Most could use some trimming, though. Draknek, I feel that your levels are not very well ordered. Some early ones offer interesting challenges, while some later ones seem fairly trivial. The last one's really smart! Some general criticism: As JW has said, it's typical to waste space in one's levels. For small puzzles like those, less is more, so it's 'good' to reduce everything to make it as tight as possible. What this results in is increased clarity: you've reduced the possibility space to only that which is interesting to the resolution of the puzzle--you've cut the chaff. Particularly, in very large levels that have you repeating the same action and going back and forth, it's added tedium; the player already solved the level in their head, but they have to go through the motions just to get the game's approval (this, sadly, happens all the time in mainstream video games that tend to be measured by 'hours of gameplay'). I guess that what stems from this idea is that, if you want it to feel fair, make your level understandable. Cut out all the intricacies that make the ideas behind it less clear. But of course, you can learn double by taking a certain pattern and reversing it. If, instead, you want to create a level that is seemingly very complicated but in reality has a very simple solution, you can increase the possibility space by intentionally adding the intricacies, thus causing confusion. You can make the player feel like they're working by making them do repeated chores devoid of mental challenge. You can make a level seem more natural by leaving the door open to alternate solutions and experimentation, no a set single solution. edit: Lord Tim, I liked your 'thinking out of the box' series, though the ideas are repeated a bit. Level 9 reminds me of a game of go. Some of your levels feel very natural, in the sense said above. |
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« Last Edit: July 09, 2010, 07:46:20 PM by agj »
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Lord Tim
Level 1
Overclocked to 20 MHz
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« Reply #59 on: July 09, 2010, 08:21:10 PM » |
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I liked a lot of these levels. Most of them I would have an idea of how to solve, but it would turn out to be a trap, and the solution being much simpler. I liked the ones that had false starts which would make you think there was a obvious first move like in 9 and 10, or the ones were you can to incrementally move forward like in 3. From the ones that are actually solvable, I thought it was interesting how you made the puzzle about the movement around the board than just pushing stuff into the right place. It doesn't seem at first that the solution is about symmetry, but it turns out to be pretty simple once you figure it out. Especially Scatter and Combination Lock. The unsolvable ones would be pretty interesting if there was a "fake block" tile that you could walk through. |
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Developer
