Facing the Future: What's Next for Official Sets?

[Ihavenoname248]

Dividing up CC levels into categories is a good idea, but a lot of times CC levels will fall between multiple play types/dominant styles. For level types that may be otherwise underrepresented (walker, blob, even maze) I can see that working, but I worry most of the levels would fall under "variety", which in itself covers a large amount of different feeling levels to play. You'd call Mr. McCallahan Presents and Automatic (Caution) Doors and Utter Clutter all variety levels, but in terms of what's similar between them it's really just the lack of one single gameplay type.

Additionally, having groups of levels like this could result in placing levels in just to check off certain design requirements that may not have levels to fill them:do we have any very good 'abstinence' levels to choose from, for example?

Level submission cap: Admittedly I'm biased as I'd be quite heavily affected by this, but I think 50 is a bit low. Just personally, I have a lot of wildly different levels within the same gameplay type (mazes come to mind here), and wildly different difficulties as well, so that just within one or two gameplay types I could hit a cap of 50. That, and people who were around for CCLP1 submissions have a general idea of what levels of theirs did well in voting and could trim based on that. Again, biased because it directly affects me, but I don't have that frame of reference (playing through all the voting packs helps, but I've seen levels from submitted sets that were better than things in the voting packs and things in the voting packs that really, really shouldn't have been there). I know my submission set has a lot more than 50 and I could definitely trim it down but it would be difficult due to the aforementioned variety to cut down to even 100 I'd say.

It may sound like I'm just disagreeing to disagree, but I figure it's better to try to think through the potential issues with a selection process before beginning work on said selection process.



One idea that could work, however, would be a combination of a submission cap and subdivided voting pools. After defining sub-categories, set limits on how many of each type of level a certain designer can submit. This prevents having to decide between multiple completely different levels to fit within a submission cap while also limiting the total amount of levels available to choose from. It also doesn't really hurt designers who mostly focus on certain types of gameplay, or hurt designers who design anything and everything. The same advantages apply during voting, with players who want to play everything (me) still being able to, and players who don't want to concern themselves with certain level archetypes (say, sokobans) can easily avoid these.

I think by the end of the month we can have a solid effort to categorize in place, and from there setting limits on how many of each type per designer.