Rule Breaking

Hello! It's Adam again!

Once again I'm here to talk about the three design pillars upon which Heibai's level design is built upon. This time, however, I'm going to break down some cases where I broke the rules deliberately in order to make a level more interesting. We'll start with the "why," as in why did I need to break these rules in these levels? 

To quickly recap my last post, the game's level design follows three core pillars of design - they are:

1. You have to be able to land in the centre of the platform you're aiming for.
2. The player shouldn't be able to accidentally hit their head on platforms above themselves.
3. Jumps which interact with a bucket must have the arc of the jump clearly telegraphed by the placement of the bucket at the arc's peak.

These pillars were put in place, primarily, to make sure the game wasn't too frustrating to play (Heibai being a casual experience is a core tenant of the game) and were hashed out during the earliest part of development through experimentation. As I made more levels however, I found it hard to make the difficulty of the game feel as though it was progressing and so I decided to start taking risks in the level design and break these rules in order to make the levels harder but not dramatically difficult. That's the why so what's the how?

The way I achieved this became coined under the term "the star path". The Star Path is the path the player takes in order to get all three stars in a level. Collecting all the stars is considered 100% beating the game and not mandatory for players to accomplish in order to finish the game and so I found that when testing, players were incentivised to try harder jumps if it meant achieving the reward of getting a collectable, and then, as the levels went on, making the star paths more complex and interesting could be used to educate players on techniques necessary for completing later levels or ease players into completely new mechanics before they were introduced.

As I made more and more levels I realised that the star paths themselves could start to be baked in as the main path you'd take to complete the level, with the regular 0 star path being fairly simple so players could leave a level if they chose. But seeing as players were now used to trying to beat the level with all the stars they tended to avoid easy solutions if it meant they didn't get everything in the level - this is very exciting from a design standpoint because it meant star paths could be as experimental as I felt necessary without harming player experience too greatly (of course, it couldn't be particularly hard but it could be more difficult than the rest of the level allowing for more diverse experiences within a level itself rather than that experience being level-to-level difficulty).

During our first round of external testing, particular problem areas arose in levels where certain jumps were too hard or confusing. In almost all these cases, these were intentional or unintentional breaks of the 3 Pillars and they felt frustrating because they were required to beat the level. But seeing as players were willing to put in the work to get the stars without feeling as though they were being cheated and with the option to go whenever they wanted, the solutions to all of these problem areas was simply to add a star there or make it a part of a star path.

Before I send you off, I just wanted to mention, like in my first post, the walls place in Heibai as they were a core part of this period of development. A complete breakdown of them is needed, and I'll get to that, but to briefly delve into it: the first time I realised I could break the core pillars was when the first time I created a jump that required you to jump from the end of a platform to the top of a wall and realised that the feeling was much more thrilling and engaging than any other jump in the game. 

See you next time! Enjoy the game!