[img]<fileStore.core_Attachment>/monthly_2017_10/blog-0569458001362888704.png.ab2e50aa833bf5d8a322602dbd34020b.png[/img]One of the most memorable experiences I had while playing the original Chip's Challenge as a kid was journeying through the epic campaign level that was Four Plex. There really wasn't a level that preceded it that was in any way so diverse while being so lengthy and linear. The first room was a challenge to navigate out of. You remember it, right? There were the twisty ice paths, all the items to collect, and blue walls to uncover. And to add to the challenge, there were even a few pop-up walls! But thankfully, failure here didn't hurt too much. You could just start over with only a few seconds of your time lost.
Once you exited this room, you proceeded onward to a much more challenging one. There were plenty of obstacles here: you had to retrieve four blocks and push them to a line of bombs, but along the way, you had to trigger a ball cloner on each trip to each block, and as a result, your window of time to get past the barrage of balls shrunk with every subsequent retrieval! Oh, and who could forget choosing the wrong direction after getting off each force slide or getting a block to your face if you didn't react quickly enough? And to top this room off, you also had to deal with a bug circling around while you maneuvered your blocks to the bomb line.
But once you completed this section, you slid into another room and may have noticed a change in tone. No monsters coming at you or darting out from corners to attack! But what's this?! Buttons everywhere! After spending a few seconds stunned at the sight of so many buttons all in one place at one time, you noticed that there's a clone machine in the corner and some bombs you need to explode. Now the objective is a bit more clear...but so was your realization that if you made one wrong calculation with those toggle walls, you could send a glider loose, maybe even into that clone button, which would cause all sorts of chaos and pandemonium! So you carefully planned your moves and eventually figured out a way to move around while keeping the toggle doors in the state you need them to be in. Eventually, all the bombs were exploded and chips collected.
Finally, you reached the fourth and last quadrant. There's no way you could mess up now; you came too far for that! That's why you were only sitting still, nervously staring at what lay ahead...pop-up walls. You really needed to be careful now - after all, one wrong move could have sent you all the way back to that first ice room, where you'd have to start all over again and go through all three of the previous sections! So, you gingerly stepped through and made sure no chip was left behind. But along the way, you probably noticed that there was a path into another area - even more, a pop-up wall-free area at that! Should you go for it, or continue exploring? You could leave a path for a return trip back, so you continued tiptoeing across the pop-up walls and collecting whatever chips you could scour. After you conquer that bit, you took on the end-of-level itemswapper! Looked like a piece of cake at first, but you may have figured those monsters circling around in the tight 3x3 spaces could have been an issue. But you couldn't let that bother you: you had to muster all the resolve you had and go for it. After a narrow escape or two, it was finally time. This was the moment you had been waiting for: the exit was in your sights! You brushed past the chip socket, slid up on the ice, and hit the left arrow key...sending you into a bomb! A bomb one square away from the exit, too! Your life was in shambles!
Okay, maybe that story was a little overdramatic. But that was my experience playing Four Plex - besides the bomb failure at the end, thank goodness. Perhaps it's not everyone's experience, but I'm willing to venture a guess that most beginners who take on this level might have made some of the mistakes described above or felt some of those emotions while taking on certain rooms. When I solved this level, I was so satisfied and thrilled. It quickly became one of my favorite CC levels. It still is. And for a while after I finished CC, I was wondering - why weren't there more levels like this in the game? I mean, sure, we had some really long levels, but come on - they all involved repetitive block pushing! Bo-ring, right? What other linear campaign levels were there with this kind of variety? Nuts and Bolts? Tossed Salad? These were all relatively short and not too difficult to complete. So what's with the lack of more epic Four Plex-esque challenges?
In recent years, sets like CCLP3 and the custom sets in which some of its levels appear have provided an answer. One of CC's inherent flaws is the lack of a checkpoint system - something that could alleviate the worry of going back to the start if a mistake were made. While I certainly can't speak for the original CC team, I'm going to bet that the original Lynx system may not have supported save states, and the levels had to be designed with this limitation in mind. Unfortunately, not every custom level designer has thought this way or realized this. The use of an editor, complete with the ability to see a level's entire map, changed level design tactics for quite some time. Because it was possible to play the game with a map in front of you, level designers could worry less about hiding items, presenting challenges that focused on guesswork, or using invalid tile combinations that would otherwise obfuscate important information from the player. It was much harder for designers - myself at the time included - to put themselves in players' shoes and think like they would upon seeing a level for the first time. The expectation seemed to be that most people who played these sets would do so for optimization and would want to have a map in front of them so they could analyze the level much more quickly. And this would all work well...as long as we weren't dealing with players who wanted to simply play the game casually without the use of any help.
And eventually, this became the case.
While playing CCLP3 and testing CCLP1 submissions, I think I've found the answer to my long-pondered question about Four Plex. It's a great level by itself, but a set with too many levels like this would simply be exhausting. Some people might say that the latter portion of CCLP3 was exactly this, and I would be inclined to agree. On top of the challenge that comes with overcoming the lack of an undo feature or checkpoint system while designing is keeping in mind that players' brains have to shift gears each time a new type of challenge presents itself. You may have noticed in the dramatic description of it earlier that I listed many different ways you could die. Think about it: a level like Writers' Block may be long, but the entire level is spent doing the exact same thing: pushing blocks in water. Sure, there's a chance for failure every time you get close to that water, but you recognize the danger early on and know what to expect whenever you go for a different chip - because it's the exact same process. On the other hand, Cityblock features an end challenge that's unlike anything that had been seen earlier in the level and presents plenty of opportunities for failure - except in this case, most of them are unknowns. The room is new, and it's hard to know what to expect around that next corner.
I hope this post doesn't come across as a scathing reproof of long levels, because long levels aren't inherently bad. Nor is this meant to say that all of our levels should be simplistic and short. It's how we design long levels that ultimately makes or breaks them. So the next time you sit down at the editor and plan out your shiny new campaign level, think about each challenge the way a beginner would approach it. Perhaps your level isn't meant for beginners, and that's okay. But many of the most fun levels out there are the levels that anyone can solve, even if they're not easy. It's how we present the challenges, how we arrange the rooms, how much leeway we give, how many opportunities for failure there are, and how well we place ourselves in a player's shoes that define just how great a level can be.
Once you exited this room, you proceeded onward to a much more challenging one. There were plenty of obstacles here: you had to retrieve four blocks and push them to a line of bombs, but along the way, you had to trigger a ball cloner on each trip to each block, and as a result, your window of time to get past the barrage of balls shrunk with every subsequent retrieval! Oh, and who could forget choosing the wrong direction after getting off each force slide or getting a block to your face if you didn't react quickly enough? And to top this room off, you also had to deal with a bug circling around while you maneuvered your blocks to the bomb line.
But once you completed this section, you slid into another room and may have noticed a change in tone. No monsters coming at you or darting out from corners to attack! But what's this?! Buttons everywhere! After spending a few seconds stunned at the sight of so many buttons all in one place at one time, you noticed that there's a clone machine in the corner and some bombs you need to explode. Now the objective is a bit more clear...but so was your realization that if you made one wrong calculation with those toggle walls, you could send a glider loose, maybe even into that clone button, which would cause all sorts of chaos and pandemonium! So you carefully planned your moves and eventually figured out a way to move around while keeping the toggle doors in the state you need them to be in. Eventually, all the bombs were exploded and chips collected.
Finally, you reached the fourth and last quadrant. There's no way you could mess up now; you came too far for that! That's why you were only sitting still, nervously staring at what lay ahead...pop-up walls. You really needed to be careful now - after all, one wrong move could have sent you all the way back to that first ice room, where you'd have to start all over again and go through all three of the previous sections! So, you gingerly stepped through and made sure no chip was left behind. But along the way, you probably noticed that there was a path into another area - even more, a pop-up wall-free area at that! Should you go for it, or continue exploring? You could leave a path for a return trip back, so you continued tiptoeing across the pop-up walls and collecting whatever chips you could scour. After you conquer that bit, you took on the end-of-level itemswapper! Looked like a piece of cake at first, but you may have figured those monsters circling around in the tight 3x3 spaces could have been an issue. But you couldn't let that bother you: you had to muster all the resolve you had and go for it. After a narrow escape or two, it was finally time. This was the moment you had been waiting for: the exit was in your sights! You brushed past the chip socket, slid up on the ice, and hit the left arrow key...sending you into a bomb! A bomb one square away from the exit, too! Your life was in shambles!
Okay, maybe that story was a little overdramatic. But that was my experience playing Four Plex - besides the bomb failure at the end, thank goodness. Perhaps it's not everyone's experience, but I'm willing to venture a guess that most beginners who take on this level might have made some of the mistakes described above or felt some of those emotions while taking on certain rooms. When I solved this level, I was so satisfied and thrilled. It quickly became one of my favorite CC levels. It still is. And for a while after I finished CC, I was wondering - why weren't there more levels like this in the game? I mean, sure, we had some really long levels, but come on - they all involved repetitive block pushing! Bo-ring, right? What other linear campaign levels were there with this kind of variety? Nuts and Bolts? Tossed Salad? These were all relatively short and not too difficult to complete. So what's with the lack of more epic Four Plex-esque challenges?
In recent years, sets like CCLP3 and the custom sets in which some of its levels appear have provided an answer. One of CC's inherent flaws is the lack of a checkpoint system - something that could alleviate the worry of going back to the start if a mistake were made. While I certainly can't speak for the original CC team, I'm going to bet that the original Lynx system may not have supported save states, and the levels had to be designed with this limitation in mind. Unfortunately, not every custom level designer has thought this way or realized this. The use of an editor, complete with the ability to see a level's entire map, changed level design tactics for quite some time. Because it was possible to play the game with a map in front of you, level designers could worry less about hiding items, presenting challenges that focused on guesswork, or using invalid tile combinations that would otherwise obfuscate important information from the player. It was much harder for designers - myself at the time included - to put themselves in players' shoes and think like they would upon seeing a level for the first time. The expectation seemed to be that most people who played these sets would do so for optimization and would want to have a map in front of them so they could analyze the level much more quickly. And this would all work well...as long as we weren't dealing with players who wanted to simply play the game casually without the use of any help.
And eventually, this became the case.
While playing CCLP3 and testing CCLP1 submissions, I think I've found the answer to my long-pondered question about Four Plex. It's a great level by itself, but a set with too many levels like this would simply be exhausting. Some people might say that the latter portion of CCLP3 was exactly this, and I would be inclined to agree. On top of the challenge that comes with overcoming the lack of an undo feature or checkpoint system while designing is keeping in mind that players' brains have to shift gears each time a new type of challenge presents itself. You may have noticed in the dramatic description of it earlier that I listed many different ways you could die. Think about it: a level like Writers' Block may be long, but the entire level is spent doing the exact same thing: pushing blocks in water. Sure, there's a chance for failure every time you get close to that water, but you recognize the danger early on and know what to expect whenever you go for a different chip - because it's the exact same process. On the other hand, Cityblock features an end challenge that's unlike anything that had been seen earlier in the level and presents plenty of opportunities for failure - except in this case, most of them are unknowns. The room is new, and it's hard to know what to expect around that next corner.
I hope this post doesn't come across as a scathing reproof of long levels, because long levels aren't inherently bad. Nor is this meant to say that all of our levels should be simplistic and short. It's how we design long levels that ultimately makes or breaks them. So the next time you sit down at the editor and plan out your shiny new campaign level, think about each challenge the way a beginner would approach it. Perhaps your level isn't meant for beginners, and that's okay. But many of the most fun levels out there are the levels that anyone can solve, even if they're not easy. It's how we present the challenges, how we arrange the rooms, how much leeway we give, how many opportunities for failure there are, and how well we place ourselves in a player's shoes that define just how great a level can be.
I just thought I'd pick a long level that actually was fairly reasonable to complete but still had some opportunities for failure, versus singling out one long level that was unreasonable to complete with four times the opportunities. In short, I still love it.
