The Toughest Level You Ever Made

[BlazingApollo]

Sup, everyone! Havent posted in here for a while. Because I'm trying to focus creating my levelset which unexpectedly took about 18 months or so (I can't remember) to create 35 levels. But my target is about 45 levels. Which means it will took another 18 months to build them. Yeah, I know, I suck at CC, both in playing or creating them



Anywaybythewaysubway, right now I'm struggling to finish designing a level named 'Hypercomplex Maze'. This level, apparently, the toughest, and the most frustating level I ever made so far. The main concept of this level is a complex maze. But what makes this level so hard to make is because, this level, described in a mathemathical formula...



(Triple Maze x 2) + (Sokoban + Steam) + Key Swapping



That's right. I created something which is more painful than a 'Triple Maze' level! I bet it's not easy to create a complex and confusing maze like 'Triple Maze'. It's because the fire, water, and force floor tile are very confusing to be placed in the right location. You have to make sure every single chips is obtainable. Some of them have to be placed in the right place to make sure there's a few places that can only be visited with only one type of boots. You have to make sure the level is also solvable, whether without or with a time limit. Yeah, Pieguy, you've done a brilliant job.



Back to my under-construction 'Hypercomplex Maze' level. Trying to expand a highly creative level like 'Triple Maze' is a difficult one. I kept thinking if it's possible to create a more complex level like 'Quadruple Maze'. Since it's a bit hard to use every elemental tiles together as a maze (especially with the ice tile). I decided to make a Triple or maybe Quadruple Maze made of Buttons.



First thing to do is, I have to make a mechanism where the player can't press different colored buttons in one phase. And on the next phase, the player must press a different colored button, and they can no longer press the first ones. And this continues until the fourth phase. Of course, the mechanism was quite hard to create. Took a couple days to figure out such mechanism.



And here goes the crazy idea. Since I remembered there's a limit of using the clone and the trap buttons, the maze won't be very large. Aaaand, I decided to put some keyswapping stuff in there. Not enough, I decided to mix the level with Triple Maze concept in it! Not enough! A sokoban is also present in the level now. Oh, almost forgot. A teleport also exist there. A mixed, messed-up salad :/



.....





It will turn out into a great level, I think (Five-Star design, ONE STAR for fun :/). Though, a great level comes a great messing-up. The maze is very confusing to look at. I mean, there's a bunch of blue, green, red, and brown button, with fire, water, and force floor tile, AND various locks PLUS a sokoban inside the very maze. I messed up my first attempt of creating the maze, of course. I restarted building the maze, and it's 45% done now. Step-by-step. Very slow.

Hopefully everything is done by tomorrow, so I can test it (hopefully it's solvable, if not, I'm gonna rage ).



That's my experience in creating a level. What about you guys? Do you have a hard time creating a single level?

[tensorpudding]

I've found that making hard levels that people actually think are any good is really hard. You can play levels like Final Destination or Bloblake that are surely extremely hard (and I think the former probably involved a lot of design effort just to make it work), but they're not actually fun, because they are only hard because of dirty tricks requiring tons of luck and near-perfect maneuvers. The good extremely hard levels I played were frustrating more than fun due to the puzzles being non-obvious and expansive, requiring many iterations of logic to figure out, but the joy of finally clenching every small facet of the puzzle made them worthwhile in the end, despite my moaning and hand-wringing while actually playing it.

I don't know if any of the hard levels I made are any good. I wouldn't release them if I thought they were bad, but knowing whether a hard puzzle level is actually fun requires you to ask people who solved the puzzle without hints, and that can take a long time. My first hard puzzle was broken several times, and when someone finally beat it, they said it was more tedious than fun due to being too much of an overcomplicated itemswapper. After that I tried to focus more on intermediate-difficulty puzzles.

[BlazingApollo]

Yeah, gotta agree with you. Hard levels will be most likely wont be fun.

Though, it seems that I've made a mistake on this thread name. By 'The Toughest Level You Ever Made', it can mean 2 things: Tell us about one of your level which is very tough to beat. But my intention to start this thread is: Tell us about the making process of a level of yours which you think is a nightmare when you made it. I really struggled to finish my 'Hypercomlex Maze' because it's very confusing to design the maze. I have to make a copy of the level. Make a maze out of green buttons. Then move it one-by-one to the real one. Then make another copy, make a maze out of water tile. Move it again to the real one. Make another copy, make a maze of a specific tile, and so on. Painful. Because there's like 8 different tiles I have to make a maze with.



That level is really giving me hard time. And now, I'm curious if everyone in here also have the same experience as me. Not when creating a maze like what I mentioned earlier. It can be any level. It can be the one which forces you to playtest it very often. Or it can be a complex puzzle which causes a headache when you think about it. A full-effort level to be made.



Also, I'm wondering about how did Madhav create his YCTaOFNT, Pieguy with his Same Game, ('insert level designer here') with Caves, Mental Blocks, Stress Fracture, and other difficult levels in the existing CCLP.

So yeah, this thread is about behind-the-scenes of a level you made.

[IceyLava108]

good question for pieguy

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[KeyboardWielder]

https://forum.bitbusters.club/thread-879.html

[Green Kitten]

Just play any level from the OLD levelset...

[pieguy]

Same Game kind of happened by accident. The original idea was just a bunch of sokoban segments. I spent a long time trying to solve the last room, but I couldn't. But then I realized that with a slight tweak, the level might still be solvable. And it was.

Sometimes the best way to make a hard level is to start by making an impossible level. Then back off until it becomes solvable.

[quiznos00]

Hmmm, I was considering posting in this thread, but there's no use now that pieguy and Madhav have posted.

Where's J.B.?

[jbdude55]

Just play any level from the OLD levelset...

Nathaniel's Very Tough Spiral

I also liked Trapfrog and Gwof, among many others I cannot possibly remember the names of =]

[Hornlitz]

My hardest level may have to be the Indiana Chip: Raiders of the Lost Chip, or Set-Up.

Set-Up was impossible for a long time because I never had the patience to try to beat it, but then I ended up playing through the level about 20 times before I got it right.

The Indiana Chip one though, I just made this extra specific route to go through with a lot of other possibilities to make the difficulty.