We each made a Megaman intermediate level for someone who is slightly new to the series, my level was mostly that but I was blinded by my own gaming skill compared to a beginner and made a few sections confusing on the powerups because I didn't fully explain the extent of the powerup.
The playtests overall went pretty well with only a few issues. From most of the people that played it said that it was fun and that they would play again. Most people told me that they really liked my use of the powerups in the level itself, like in this section.
They told me that the powerups worked well for the level, but there were points where I didn't fully teach something and in turn, players were confused.
What didn't work, for this playtest we had to incorporate powerups, I tried really hard to wrap the level around these, and in turn, the enemy placements were few and far between. I had an issue where an enemy placement actually allowed players to skip a tutorial for a powerup due to immunity frames. It happened in this particular level.
This same room had the most dislikes out of them all. Peoples biggest reason for the hate is because I taught them how to climb with the plunger ability, but I never taught them how to cross spike gaps with it. But I did do a great job of introducing the dash powerup, by making most jumps require it, so I always gave energy to the player.
One improvement I would want to make is about the length, it's only 8-9 rooms but each room takes a moment to get through. I wanted to teach the powerups a little better than what I did on my map, I wanted to put more into the enemies, but we were put on a forest theme.
Most of the level was good progression, but I messed up on the ending sequence, the ending just felt a little empty, and if you didn't follow the subtle story throughout the map, then you wouldn't see that the forest burned down.
I made some enemies shoot at the player from the start, and on that second platform, they would get hit by shots instead of just avoiding them.
When playing through the level, there was a pretty clear critical path that players went on.
My overall flow of this level was with rooms that took time to go through, most of them had you going from top to bottom or bottom to top.
My level was very linear with no real alternate paths to go on, this could mean a very boring level, but it depends on how you present these linear levels, and it seemed like others liked it as well.
For every person that played my level, none of them asked me where to go, but they did get confused on the spike part that I said earlier, but other than that my playtesters knew exactly where to go.
I then interviewed Sam, one of my playtesters and asked him what I discussed above.
What went right?
The level has a good beginning portion to ease the player in, I felt like I knew how to fight some of the enemies after their first encounter.
What went wrong?
That spike part was hard, wasn't much guidance. I also ran out of ammo and couldn't progress to the end of the level.
Were the challenges presented appropriately to the skill level of the player?
I would say that the pacing is good all the way to the end, but like I said that ending needs to be tuned a little.
Was it obvious where you were supposed to go?
The only part that was confusing was the spike pit, other than that the level was straight forward.
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