20-Jul-2015, 1:33 AM
(This post was last modified: 20-Jul-2015, 1:34 AM by Motekopasznyaku.)
Thank you very much Joshua, I really appreciate all of your feedback here! And while I'm very glad to see that several of the levels were quite enjoyable to you, I find your criticisms very important as well. I'll try to respond to each of those for now --
05 FILLER
Sorry to hear that you found this frustrating, I thought it was pretty fun myself to be honest. Admittedly I don't exactly have too much of a strategy for this other than hanging around the bottom-right exit and just kind of moving randomly at first to fill the place up, and then when it starts getting crowded I'd start to be a bit more careful about my steps, while always moving down any time there are any open spaces directly below the cloner. Though I'll also admit that I haven't managed to get both bonuses in it yet, but I figure it ought to be somewhat possible, just rather tricky.
07 COMPACT
Bridging to the button was actually my original intended solution, but using the glider to hit it instead is indeed a possible alternate solution!
08 BLINDNESS
Fair enough! I really liked the idea of keeping the players on their toes outside of what was visible, especially with the Red button psyche out, but perhaps I've been watching too many I Wanna Be The Guy fangames lately. Still, I will consider either moving the red button to a place that's easier for "checking" if a player's still alive, or simply removing it completely along with the rest of those extra distractions.
11 BLOB BLOCK II
Oh no! Yeah, the perfection bonus here is definitely very difficult to snag, but I hoped it wouldn't be too difficult to multitask between the two activities enough to be left with a reasonable amount of blobs in the end area. Perhaps it would help if I were to add some gravel down there & make it a Chip level
12 LINEAR ACCESS
Oh dear, I'm very sorry to hear that just the starting area gave you so much trouble here! I had actually figured out a strategy that worked consistently well for me, keeping the teeth 2 tiles from the buttons before making a run for the goal when the ball was around 2-3 spaces from it's button, but I guess that wasn't as obvious or usable as I had thought. Hmm, I definitely want to try to figure out a way to make this level more easily playable, though I'm not terribly sure what to do with making just the beginning seem easier or so.
13 PORCUPINE
Hm...Again I did have a bit of fun in my testing of this level when originally playing around trying to figure out how to get it to work, but I think that may have involved a huge creator-bias in playing my own level. I definitely see how this can be frustrating.
Maybe if I were to deal with the length a bit it could help seem less intimidating at least, as I did like the kind of trick involved with finishing the first third or so of the level, which I think could probably work well enough as a stand alone idea without the rest of the level.
14 MEMORY MACHINE
Regarding your three points...
#1) That's what that space in the canopy-filled bottom center of the Chip-collecting area was for, to show you which item you need to grab next! If you mean actually finding the proper path for each item after you have it though, I could maybe try placing the items on the walls next to the doors, but that might not exactly work as well on the corners that are next to two doors at a time.
#2) Fair point, I'm guessing you're mostly referring to the Force-Floor & Ice areas. I tried making them seem a bit more doable than I originally had them actually, as well as slightly skewing the RNG to have those appear earlier, but now that I have a better idea of what kind of difficulty I should go for, I'll look into making them better to play, and maybe looking more into the Dirt, Ghost, and Speed-Boots areas as well with that in mind.
#3) Also a good point - Originally the idea for the level involved the paths to each canopy to be long so as to serve as a punishment for any time you remember incorrectly, but that's probably an idea more worth scrapping. I'll definitely try figuring out a smaller layout for easier navigating when dropping tools. (Believe it or not, it used to be even worse with thin walls all around! I'm glad I got rid of those at least, but just that probably wasn't enough)
15 LAYERED DISPLACEMENT
Now here's where I think I'm going to have to disagree -- I don't particularly think that the small view would be what hurts this level, but rather perhaps the concept is too difficult to figure out.
The idea behind this level is that all four rooms essentially have identical layouts, with the only real difference is that Chip is replaced with Mirror Chips in the two adjacent rooms, and no one in the room diagonally away. I like to think of the rooms more like layers as the title might imply, as each of the buttons are wired so that when any one of them is pushed, it powers a circuit linked to each of the other buttons at that position in the other 3 rooms. To open the doors to the exit, you need to have the 8 main button circuits powered, which requires each of the blocks from each layer. However, the 9th button circuit (the button in the lower right corner of each room/layer), powers the doors to the other rooms/layers. I could try figuring out how to explain that better in a hint for the level, as I really love the concept here and wouldn't want to need to change things too much.
16 TEMPLE OF THE TOOTH
...Yeah, this is meant to be a very puzzle focused level for the big puzzle fans, but I might've gone a bit overboard with all the cryptic puzzles here. Perhaps things could seem more reasonable if I were to explain how the first one works to get things started - The first room on the left is solved with the clue centered in front of the entrance to the hint room on the right -- The hint shows the same letters from the room on the right, except the trapped tiles you don't want to touch are replaced with an X (An X will always represent death here). Meanwhile the letters you do want to step on are shown at the bottom, with the arrow showing the order to step on those three tiles. Many of the other puzzles were set up similarly in mind, where the idea is figuring out which tiles are trapped in which rooms, and also figuring out if there's also a series of tiles you need to step in order. I was kind of meaning for the first puzzle to serve as a kind of introduction on what's to be expected in the level anyway, so I could try finding a way to explicitly explain the point of it without diverging too far from the concept I had in mind, assuming that would be enough to give players a push in the right direction.
...Phew! This post wound up being quite a bit longer than I had planned, sorry about that! Thanks again for all the feedback Joshua, you've given me a lot to think about here; I'll try working on improving these levels to fix the issues you've pointed out soon!
05 FILLER
Sorry to hear that you found this frustrating, I thought it was pretty fun myself to be honest. Admittedly I don't exactly have too much of a strategy for this other than hanging around the bottom-right exit and just kind of moving randomly at first to fill the place up, and then when it starts getting crowded I'd start to be a bit more careful about my steps, while always moving down any time there are any open spaces directly below the cloner. Though I'll also admit that I haven't managed to get both bonuses in it yet, but I figure it ought to be somewhat possible, just rather tricky.
07 COMPACT
Bridging to the button was actually my original intended solution, but using the glider to hit it instead is indeed a possible alternate solution!
08 BLINDNESS
Fair enough! I really liked the idea of keeping the players on their toes outside of what was visible, especially with the Red button psyche out, but perhaps I've been watching too many I Wanna Be The Guy fangames lately. Still, I will consider either moving the red button to a place that's easier for "checking" if a player's still alive, or simply removing it completely along with the rest of those extra distractions.
11 BLOB BLOCK II
Oh no! Yeah, the perfection bonus here is definitely very difficult to snag, but I hoped it wouldn't be too difficult to multitask between the two activities enough to be left with a reasonable amount of blobs in the end area. Perhaps it would help if I were to add some gravel down there & make it a Chip level
12 LINEAR ACCESS
Oh dear, I'm very sorry to hear that just the starting area gave you so much trouble here! I had actually figured out a strategy that worked consistently well for me, keeping the teeth 2 tiles from the buttons before making a run for the goal when the ball was around 2-3 spaces from it's button, but I guess that wasn't as obvious or usable as I had thought. Hmm, I definitely want to try to figure out a way to make this level more easily playable, though I'm not terribly sure what to do with making just the beginning seem easier or so.
13 PORCUPINE
Hm...Again I did have a bit of fun in my testing of this level when originally playing around trying to figure out how to get it to work, but I think that may have involved a huge creator-bias in playing my own level. I definitely see how this can be frustrating.
Maybe if I were to deal with the length a bit it could help seem less intimidating at least, as I did like the kind of trick involved with finishing the first third or so of the level, which I think could probably work well enough as a stand alone idea without the rest of the level.
14 MEMORY MACHINE
Regarding your three points...
#1) That's what that space in the canopy-filled bottom center of the Chip-collecting area was for, to show you which item you need to grab next! If you mean actually finding the proper path for each item after you have it though, I could maybe try placing the items on the walls next to the doors, but that might not exactly work as well on the corners that are next to two doors at a time.
#2) Fair point, I'm guessing you're mostly referring to the Force-Floor & Ice areas. I tried making them seem a bit more doable than I originally had them actually, as well as slightly skewing the RNG to have those appear earlier, but now that I have a better idea of what kind of difficulty I should go for, I'll look into making them better to play, and maybe looking more into the Dirt, Ghost, and Speed-Boots areas as well with that in mind.
#3) Also a good point - Originally the idea for the level involved the paths to each canopy to be long so as to serve as a punishment for any time you remember incorrectly, but that's probably an idea more worth scrapping. I'll definitely try figuring out a smaller layout for easier navigating when dropping tools. (Believe it or not, it used to be even worse with thin walls all around! I'm glad I got rid of those at least, but just that probably wasn't enough)
15 LAYERED DISPLACEMENT
Now here's where I think I'm going to have to disagree -- I don't particularly think that the small view would be what hurts this level, but rather perhaps the concept is too difficult to figure out.
The idea behind this level is that all four rooms essentially have identical layouts, with the only real difference is that Chip is replaced with Mirror Chips in the two adjacent rooms, and no one in the room diagonally away. I like to think of the rooms more like layers as the title might imply, as each of the buttons are wired so that when any one of them is pushed, it powers a circuit linked to each of the other buttons at that position in the other 3 rooms. To open the doors to the exit, you need to have the 8 main button circuits powered, which requires each of the blocks from each layer. However, the 9th button circuit (the button in the lower right corner of each room/layer), powers the doors to the other rooms/layers. I could try figuring out how to explain that better in a hint for the level, as I really love the concept here and wouldn't want to need to change things too much.
16 TEMPLE OF THE TOOTH
...Yeah, this is meant to be a very puzzle focused level for the big puzzle fans, but I might've gone a bit overboard with all the cryptic puzzles here. Perhaps things could seem more reasonable if I were to explain how the first one works to get things started - The first room on the left is solved with the clue centered in front of the entrance to the hint room on the right -- The hint shows the same letters from the room on the right, except the trapped tiles you don't want to touch are replaced with an X (An X will always represent death here). Meanwhile the letters you do want to step on are shown at the bottom, with the arrow showing the order to step on those three tiles. Many of the other puzzles were set up similarly in mind, where the idea is figuring out which tiles are trapped in which rooms, and also figuring out if there's also a series of tiles you need to step in order. I was kind of meaning for the first puzzle to serve as a kind of introduction on what's to be expected in the level anyway, so I could try finding a way to explicitly explain the point of it without diverging too far from the concept I had in mind, assuming that would be enough to give players a push in the right direction.
...Phew! This post wound up being quite a bit longer than I had planned, sorry about that! Thanks again for all the feedback Joshua, you've given me a lot to think about here; I'll try working on improving these levels to fix the issues you've pointed out soon!