CAGD 270 - Level Design

  Bryan Hodoyan, Fernando Uribe-Hernandez, Jonathan Villaloboz, Mia Anderson, and Samantha Shanahan playtested my level. Some things that I noticed while the players were playing my level is that there were a handful of portions of the level that went unexplored due to the inclusion of keys. In my level, I utilized keys and doors to provide the player with alternative routes that were slight shortcuts over the normal routes. However, I believe that that addition gave the players a sense of incompleteness in that they were aware of the fact that they had not explored all that the level had to offer.  There was a portion of the level where the players needed to jump across a pit onto a falling block, and then immediately jump onto a ladder before the block fell. This was a needless difficulty spike that only created frustration for the player as it was noticeably more difficult than the portions of the level before and after. Another issue that the level had was that there was l...

  I had my level play tested by Mia Anderson, Bennie Ksiazek, Fernando Uribe-Hernandez, and Samantha Shanahan. Something that went right with the level was that the changes I made from the previous version of the level showed marked improvements in the gameplay experience for the player.  One of the changes that I had chosen to make was to optimize the placement of enemies, and to decrease the amount of them. In the first playtest, when the players were focused on the platforming challenges I had created for them, they kept getting attacked and set back by enemies on different platforms. I could tell just by watching the players play that it was a frustrating experience. It may have added a degree of difficulty to the level, but in this case it was not necessarily a positive thing as the level is meant to be geared towards beginners at Mega Man. Additionally, the way that it set the player back was frustrating and cumbersome. In the updated version of the level, the first thin...

Fernando Uribe-Hernandez, Bennie Ksiazek, Mia Anderson, and Selena Benavides playtested my level. The playtest was somewhat smooth, but there were some issues which the players ran into that could have easily been fixed with more playtesting. One of the things that went right was the players were able to follow the critical path through the level. It was fairly straightforward as the path for the players to take only diverged once, at the beginning, and each path contained many checkpoints. I felt that a lot more went wrong with the levels than went right. One of the issues that I noticed the playtesters ran into was that there were simply too many enemies. In conceptualizing and building the level, it did not seem like there were too many of them. But, being unfamiliar with how Mega Man works and having never played it before, I did not know that the enemies respawned once Mega Man moved out of an area of the level. So, players would move back and forth through the sections, thinking ...