What a lot of people don't realize as they go to school is the idea that they will fail. They will fail miserably, painfully and terribly. Yet, that concept and action of failure is what this great frontier is all about.
Below is the first level of a 2D game created by my first team at Purdue University.
Shurik's Revenge - Created 2007
Platform: Nokia N95 Cell Phone
Genre: Platformer
Art Style: 2D
The premise of the game followed a young ninja (like Ninja Gaiden) as he stumbles upon his burning Village being attacked by Pirates. A big influence on us was Ninja Gaiden, as the beginning was both a parody & nod to NG.
Biggest mistake:
The game was too hard, and poorly designed. Now, a lot of people will say, well if its like NG, isn't it supposed to be hard? Unfortunately for me, I took it upon myself to make the level design irritating, without ever giving the players the necessary tools to accomplish the goals easily.
Not only that, but, as a game on a mobile platform, I overlooked the idea that players would already have uncomfortable hand placement on the key-pad/arrow-pad.
Below is an example of the original first level:
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Analysis (Original): Overall, one would think this was a solid level, for the middle of a game. The big problem here was, I threw too much at the player at the get-go. The player didn't have sufficient time to get used to the controls, and already they had to leap over a pit of fire that the character could barely make even with precice controlling.
They also had to jump over gaps without any knowledge of what was ahead of them, often times making blind leaps of faith to their death. While enemy placement was not shown in this, I placed a lot of "ranged" enemies at the beginning before the player even had the chance to practice against "melee" attackers.
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To improve on this I had to go back to the drawing board. I wanted to give players the ability to ease into the game, understand the controls, and not become frustrated in the first two minutes. I also wanted to continue giving the player the "awe" sense of stumbling onto his Village in flames. This time around though, I made sure to open up the starting area with less obstacles, and also surprise the player with flaming Village buildings later on.
Re-designed Map Layout:
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Analysis (Re-Design): The biggest change to this was creating a simpler introduction. There were no longer pits of fire you had to jump over. No more invisible pits & leaps of faith. The one major leap that you were required to do was jumping down into the main village. But there was no danger to your health or safety. I kept the "awe moment" by filling the villages with fire slowly eating up toward the buildings.
Now the player could learn the controls from the very beginning while fighting melee pirates. They wouldn't become stuck at the "jump over fire pit" encounter. By creating a higher sense of vertigo over the village buildings, it also allowed players to experience variety in their surroundings.
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Conclusion:
Pacing and difficulty is an hard thing to balance that takes experience but also a lot of analytical trial and erro. By making this kind of mistake, I know now not to create the same kind of impossible situations in my future games. The ability for players to also slowly ease to the world and controls also plays an higher role in immersion into a game.
