Mega Man Level V2 Feedback

 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 thing that I changed was that I removed a good amount of the enemies, or moved them to different positions. In the most recent playtest, there were some enemy placements that could have been improved upon, but the gameplay was noticeably smoother and less rough overall.

Another change I made were minor changes to the terrain. In the first version of the Mega Man level, many of the levitating platforms were a type of platform that sunk when the player stood on them. I took those platforms out and instead replaced them with platforms that fell after a moment of the player standing on them. These made the platforming much more interesting and less annoying to deal with.

The last significant change I made to the level was that I extended the level slightly to include the feature of keys and doors. This gave me a chance to experiment with a different type of design than the type that I had been accustomed to. For most of the first version of my level, everything about the level was compact. From the enemies to the platforming to the environmental obstacles, everything that I had built was densely contained. In the last part of the new level, I tried stretching out the interactions a little bit more so that it was not overwhelming for the player, and I think that change was a positive one that I could look forward to using more often in the future.

Something that went wrong with this playtest is that many of the transitions between tiles and segments of the level were disorienting and hard to adapt to for the player. Some of the transitions were abrupt, such as falling down a long shaft and then immediately facing another opponent. Some of the transitions were out of place, such as two different segments of the level being visually separated so the player had to walk to the edge of the screen to engage with the next part of the level, only to be attacked or surprised by either an enemy or the environment.

Overall, there were many more improvements than issues in this version of the level. If I were to make more changes to it, some of the changes I would try and make is that I would decompress the amount of player interaction that the player has so that it is not too overwhelming for them when traversing the level. I also would patch up any transitions so that the player is eased into the next segment instead of catapulted into it.