2D Mega Man Level v1

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 they could freely traverse the level, and only end up facing far too many enemies for them to handle. Fortunately, they were able to succeed in the end after many attempts at the level.

Another issue that the players encountered due to my lack of experience with Mega Man Maker was that they were unable to reach some parts of the level without walking out of the area and walking back into it in order to force it to respawn. In using these platforms that sank when the player stood on them but rose when the player jumped off of them, the players were continually soft locked into having to reload the area by walking away and returning to the area. But, in doing that, the players also respawned the abundance of enemies that were within the level, which made each attempt as difficult and annoying as the last.

Another issue was that for some sections of the level, the transitions between each area threw off the players more often than not and at one point even prevented the players from progressing through the level. This problem is easily solved, however, as I can change the method of transition between areas easily.

I plan on improving my level through multiple ways. One of the ways I am going to improve my level is through the length of it. There are many sections that I can extend easily by giving the player more space to breathe in between encounters with opponents. I can also improve my level by decreasing the number of enemies that are encountered, and changing some of the obstacles so that it is simpler for players to traverse.

I plan on using different kinds of blocks and different enemies in the next rendition of the level. I think that something that could have been improved upon was the variety of opponents which the players faced in the level. I only used around 4 to 5 enemies in the level–while that made playtesting a little more straightforward, it also did not help to make the combat any more interesting or less repetitive. Incorporating some enemy variation into the level would help a lot by keeping the players engaged and focused on the combat.

As far as using different blocks goes, the main block that I want to remove from the level is the falling and rising platforms which I used. Initially, when designing the level, I intended for those blocks to be the kind of blocks that simply fell a moment after being stood on by the player. But, due to my lack of knowledge around the level builder and Mega Man objects, I did not know that there was another type of block that would serve the exact purpose that I wanted until playtesting my classmates' own levels.