08-Aug-2012, 3:22 PM
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.
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.