Level Design Issues

Playtesting always exposes level design issues. I want to share some of these issues that playtesters found in the first few levels of Tumbleton's Fortune.

These are the things that you didn't think about or simply forgot to add to your level. When a playtester gets stuck on these things, you just kind of facepalm yourself for not making the solution more obvious. Issues like these are bound to happen though, because during development you're playing your levels so much, it becomes second nature and you don't even think about it anymore. That is why playtesting is so vital for having a fun game.

Also, you can't get everything right on your first pass, but through iteration and constantly playtesting your level, you can get pretty close to being happy with your level.

Let's get right on with it.

The first puzzle of the game it a little too ambiguous for my liking. Players are tasked with attaching a giant bridge object to a block on the opposite side of them to cover a huge gap. The bridge object fits nice and snug into the gap.

However, because the game allows players to attach objects anywhere, there's a lot of incorrect ways to place an object:




A feature that would make this puzzle easier to solve would be to designate where the bridge object should be attached, especially if it's the first puzzle and the player is yet unfamiliar with the main game mechanic.



In the second puzzle of the game, the player has to position two platforms on a wall and jump on them to vertically traverse the wall. The idea is that the player would come up to a wall, try to jump over it, and realize that it was too tall. There's a path nearby that leads to the 2 powerup platforms that the player needs to traverse the wall.

The problem was that it took the players longer than I expected to realize what to do with these 2 objects and where to go next. They eventually figured it out by zooming out the camera and looking where the level would continue.



The area where the player has to climb the wall (top right). You can see the path that he needs to follow to obtain the powerup platforms to the left.



A better solution that would get rid of the guessing would be to have an arrow texture on the wall, pointing up. This would clearly convey to the players that they need to go up at that spot.

Another issue that I discovered from watching our playtesters relates to the game notifying the player what just happened. In one area, the player must push a block onto an unlock spot to unlock a door. The problem is that the unlock spot is to the side of the door, and the player can position the camera so that it's not looking at the door when he pushes the block unto the unlock spot.



When that happens and the doors opens, there's no visual cue to it, making it hard to figure out what just occurred unless you were looking at the door. A solution on top of an audio cue would be to write on the screen something like "Door Opened!"