I've been thinking about this for a while now, but why don't we as a community talk more about real level design and try making levels that are more fun?

Think about it, we present ourselves as a multi-game level database and as a level-making community, but our best works are just plain amateurish. And when you look at our level ratings, no one thinks any deeper into what makes a level fun or unfun; they just say "this is cool" or "this is boring," and that's usually the entire conversation (unless such reasons are obvious). While the lack of new levels is partly because of school, I think it's also largely because we're just getting bored of these kinds of shallow discussions and shallow levels.

So I say it's about time we started challenging ourselves. With a major Aeon demo just around the corner, we have a great opportunity to start taking level design more seriously, if at least for the sake of our game. I think it's great when we have deep discussions like this and this, but what I really want to see is people making levels in an attempt to experiment with and apply some of these concepts. Perhaps we could even stage some comps around these ideas (design a good tutorial level, or design a level with good pacing).

What do you think?

I agree with you so much.

I think it's a very good idea to set a semi-challenging goal for making a level, aka me making a large level in KS, then do your best to reach that goal, putting a lot of effort in your level on the way.

People need to do this more often. (But I guess a few small levels is OK sometimes.)
I'm not all that good at level rating, so I can't say much about that myself, but maybe others can.

Also I'm excited for the Aeon demo and I want to make a good-ish level with it sometime!

I have several ideas on level design, such as the different scales in levels and how they should interact, or the timing of excitement in levels. I wanted to write a few blog posts about them, but I never got around to it.

Hey, I do this all the time in my more in-depth rates! Especially when I bash secret areas.

I always give deep rates with explanations when I give out rates

I've gotten better at rating thoroughly. I usually aim for at least 2 paragraphs when rating a decent/horrid HATPC level. Sometimes, deepness doesn't work, though. How am I supposed to thorougly examine a RR level or one of Sup_mus's caves?

As for more sophisticated levels, any level that actually looks cool usually goes ignored/is never made for a few reasons (I'll not address school, cuz it's obvious and unavoidable),

1 "HATPC doesn't work". That ones understandable, maybe we'll be able to rate/make levels better when we actually have a game the entire community can access all the time*.

2. "Something at the very beginning sucks and it ruins the rest of the experience". That does suck when a level is ruined by an opening trap. The best bet is to help the creator change it to something more reasonable, or use a checkpoint. If neither is going to happen, hopefully the maker will realize this themselves when nobody plays their levels or nobody mentions the lovely 2nd trap. The good thing is, if we give better advice, people will probably stop naturally doing this.

3. "Anything I make will suck". Well that's because you suck . Actually, we've all felt this before and have became demotivated by it. But making levels like riding a bike or making Krabby Patties; you can't stop once you fall off, forget the pickles, or even make a bad level. You have to start up again some where. Feel your ideas are stale? History repeats itself, look thru levels from teh golden days, and see if there's any traps you think could be revamped into something cooler/your style. I'm not saying to rip off levels, but influences help. Almost every good level I've made, I've had some level(s) in the back of my mind that I was basing the objective/style on. Or finally, buddy up. You may not have enough genius to make a cave for now, but maybe if you take some half-idea you have, and stick it with another half idea someone else has, you'll get a decent collab. The 1st collab comp we had brought out some of the best levels in long time.

4. "IT'S TOO HARD! HUURRRR!". Now you do suck. If a part requires extreme precision or it's just pure luck, then yeah, **** it. But, I'm always open to going back to levels that I had trouble with. To simply give up or avoid a level because you couldn't beat a speed trap or a puzzle confused you is stupid. The creator is almost always willing to compensate (I literally give out solutions to my puzzles in caves that aren't entirely puzzle if someone is stuck). When "hardness" is mentioned, "fun" is usually regurgitated right into the debate. Fun and hard can coexist. Yeah, things are too hard, but you can never have too much fun. Some of the coolest levels I know are difficult. IN A GOOD WAY! I know there are no levels to bash for being hard these days, but that card was used waaay too much back in the day, IMO.

It seems like the level community has been left for dead on the Interguild after catching Schooliosis and catching the Minecraft-shingles when it's immune system was weakened. I feel we can still manage a legit level making community until Aeon is made. After that, hopefully we'll have one thrust upon us. Here are a few scattershot ideas, to bump up good level production and make our gallery look like it's a professional:

1. Floating comps: This may not work, but a lot of excuses for not entering a comp are generally along the lines of "I won't have enough time to make a good level before the deadline". Why not put out 4-5 comps at a time, with no specific deadline? This doesn't have to be like the IO where several generic categories are posted and you have 1-4 weeks or something, we can put out actually comp ideas. It's just better to have a choice instead of no choice. No deadline comps=less pressure to git it done. How would we know when the comps done? Instead of setting an amount of time, and getting varying amount of entries, why not setting an amount of entries, and getting a varying amount of time? "Oh Yaya! What if I wanted to make a level, but that mean old Shos entered something he made while he was smashed before I started". That is one of the reasons for having multiple comps at once. FULL CIRCLE!

I'm not saying completely convert/revert to this, timed comps are great also for some situations. But I don't think they are for the one we are in right now.

2. VIP HALL!: Any stranger who wanders on to our site in search of a friendly, awesome, gaming community that mainly focuses on a game about a treasure collecting squirrel will probably notice only 912 (give or take a handful levels that were rated then noveltied) are rated, good or back ratings. There are 2994 levels in the database. That's roughly only 30% of all the levels. That sucks big sweaty donkey cojones. "But Yaya! If we rated all the levels, the bad levels would outnumber the good levels by the bushel^69!". That's where the VIP hall idea comes in. Isa will know what I'm talking about here: he and I frequent a site where anyone can upload lots of different content (a level making community, but it's the same). Keep in mind, anyone can upload content even if it sucks. But content to people see when they go in the main viewing area? The stuff that people actually like. The site uses a "like"/"dislike" system. When content is 1st created, people can like or dislike it, but the golden entries, move on up through 1-2 more stages, before BAM! They're on the front page. Anything on the front page almost always has more than 4-5k likes, which isn't too hard to achieve if your content is truly worthy.

The Interguild Adaption? Level galley, woo*******hoo. Everyone and anyone can upload levels here; whether it be Isa's next masterpiece, Quirvy's new brain-scratcher, or anything Sup_Mus loads to his little heart's content. Then there's the VIP gallery, where any level with more than X ratings can get in if it averages above score X (this could be decided/changed and mods' discretion and exceptions could be made likewise. This would be the place that you're taken to when you click Level Database, but you could freely view the Gallery also (and we'd keep the new levels page so any contenders wouldn't get buried under the rubble, crap, and obscurity.

It seems like the level community has been left for dead on the Interguild after catching Schooliosis and catching the Minecraft-shingles when it's immune system was weakened. I feel we can still manage a legit level making community until Aeon is made. After that, hopefully we'll have one thrust upon us. We're only 6 levels away from reaching 3000 levels, let's make it a good one. Sorry if this post is absurdly wrong for a trivial manner. We still got game left. INTERGUILD GO!

*I will personally castrate Livio with a rusty wooden spoon if he let's Aeon fall into a similar position for eternity like HATPC. But he seems legit.

Hard =/= Fun, but there's a point where hard becomes "too hard". Like Jebby said, you want your masterpieces to be hard (for me, it's The Metal Movement, arguably the most praised level I've made), but they can still be fun. However, rarely do I find these masterpieces to be the best levels - I mean, my personal favorite level I've made is still The Pipe Dream, which I find significantly easier. I mean, people have actually beaten The Pipe Dream in one go! That's more than you can say about The Metal Movement.

Anyway, I agree that Aeon will hopefully bring us back on the level-making track, because at least the game will be working properly.

Now, about that VIP hall: http://www.interguild.org/levels/?order=rate&in=levels&by=DESC I think that the idea is good, but it already exists somewhat, although in a watered-down form. It could do with better promotion however.

AN IDEA: Allow users to classify their levels. Speed/Puzzle/Innovation/DDA/Work In Progress/Other, just as a few examples from the top of my head, and then let users search for levels within this category.
In fact, I think Livio should get to work on that at once, because it'd make the level gallery so much more flexible. (Also, Livio, allow us mods to add new categories if we ever believe it's needed)

I'm not sold on multiple competitions, because it means people split their focus. We need to take in what the community wants...however, I remember that whenever this has been tried, we got few responses.

Yeah, my main beef with the current highest rated page is 20 of those levels, the highest rated ones only have 1-2 votes. Even better levels are found beyond the first couple pages simply cuz they've been voted on more since it's been averaged out. I know I went on a limb with some ideas, but I decided to not hold anything back this time and let all my ideas out. Multiple comps may not be the solution, though I feel there need's to be some improvement to competitions.

There is a difference between hard and annoying. A level can be very hard, but still fun to play, while a level can also be merely challenging, yet absolutely dreadful to play. This difference can be pretty difficult to put into words, but I'll try.
Examples of annoying are levels that rely on super-human skills, heavily involve luck, have many difficult, but bland sections, has a "cheap" trap near the end of the cave or after an intense section, requires knowledge of the level's design (such as with secret areas), mixes difficult puzzles with extremely tight timed sections or have one single near impassible section.
Examples of fun difficult are levels that you progress further in every few attempts, have a more "flashy" design, have difficult puzzles that can don't require much playing skill of the player or make original use of a mechanic.

With "cheap" I mean traps that will cause you to die at least once, either because they are somewhat luck based or because they require knowledge of the player (picking between two paths with one leading to certain death). These are pretty much the only reason I hate gigantic levels. There is always some cheap section 15 minutes into the cave, causing me to die and start all over again.
With "flashy" I mean sections that appear more difficult than they actually are. Levels with lots of arrows flying around, boulders falling and dynamite exploding. Even if they aren't timed too tight, they will pump my adrenaline far more.

A level needs to be possible without investing too much time, but completing it should still feel like an accomplishment.

Yaya, your post has helped me realized just how lame the typical level-playing experience is on this site.

The biggest and most notorious cause of this is that we simply don't know how to manage difficulty. Rather than designing the level out from start to finish, we build whatever comes to mind first, and then go from there. This leads to strange and unwelcome difficulty spikes and drops throughout the experience and it's not cool. Even worse is when you get a level where everything's going good until you get to that one trap that you just can't pass, so you give up.

The solution to this would be to first become more aware of these things and try to avoid them as we make levels. But another key solution would be to playtest our levels before releasing them so that we can find these flaws more often.

Going along with what jell was talking about, I think it's important to design every level as a tutorial level. You must constantly consider the player's skill set while designing so that you may more properly keep them entertained with your level. I'm not saying we should make our levels as easy as possible, but instead I mean something more like this:

All this talk of level design has given me some great ideas for Aeon. We should add features that will make it easier for people to design their levels properly. Perhaps give designers the option to have the game record player data whenever someone plays your level. You can then go through the data and figure out which areas players are dying the most in, and what are the traps where players spend most of their time in. We could also add deep collaboration settings, allowing someone to upload their level as private and then invite users as either playtesters or collaborators. Maybe give them their own private forum topic, as well.

Hey, maybe we could revive that Challenges thing that we used to have? And maybe we could keep score this time, where you can see how many challenges a user has completed. We could even maintain an overall Challenges ranking, based on how you performed in each challenge. Kinda like the final IO rankings.

Yes, I agree. Several months ago I started working on a redesign of the level database, and I really want to get back to that. I remember talking about how the new database would give each level an image just like we do with videos. I think images will go a long way towards promoting content, and it will bring us one step closer to having automatically generated featured content.

What if we used tags instead? I think it's much more flexible and doesn't even need to rely on mods.

I attempted an IHT level recently but when you've copied and pasted the code and you've clicked the load button it doesn't do anything.

Why did Livio not get any replies to his post?

Anyway, I believe it should be easy to add at least a counter of the cause of death for each level, and if possible, showing somehow where you've died the most. EVEN better would be if this feedback was sent to the player, like you said. Private collabs were discussed earlier I think.

Tags are fine - the point is, get a system like that in.

I'm not sure what benefit the player could have to seeing where they are dying the most. Although I do think that we should make such data easily accessible to people who aren't the level designer, because it's a great way to learn from other people's mistakes. Maybe there could be an option in the level editor or the pause menu that will bring up that data and display it as an overlay to the level.

We could also create a feature that would allow people to annotate each other's levels. They would be able to leave comments on specific areas and point to things that are either bad or good about the level. It'd be a really cool and visual way to facilitate deeper discussions on level design.

Man, designing the level editor is going to be a huge challenge...

On games like Doodle Jump, they give you stats of what's killed you the most and some other stuff like records/bests. They don't really help you, but people like to know these sort of things, in a reflective existential way.

Yes to all of these, including the last.

Do things one by one. Get the core done now, work on the features we are suggesting later on.

I can imagine people making annotations in response to someone else's annotations and eventually starting a full discussion. Perhaps each annotation point could be like a thread that will facilitate multiple comments and replies. If that happens, it might be worth trying to figure out how to tie these conversations with the forums.

I'd like it if you could see these conversations when looking at a level's database page. Not only would it display and promote deeper level design discussions, but it would also mark the level as having unread posts each time someone adds an annotation or comments on an existing one. But the challenge is how to properly display them while also allowing people to reply to them from the forums (something that will inevitably happen if we display them on here). Would we simply make each annotation a post, and then show its replies underneath it, like a sub-topic? Or would we mix the posts throughout the conversation (like we do with level rates), and then maybe provide the option to limit your view to the posts in the current annotation thread. And on that note, we could also add options to limit views to level rates and difficulty rates as well.

Speaking of difficulty rates, should we still keep them? Every level should strive to be "challenging", and a well-designed level should either keep the level from getting too hard or properly teach the player how to play better. I think what we really need is a "Skill Level" indicator, meaning how good at the game you should be in order to play this level. And such a setting would ideally be set by the level designer, rather than the public, because it represents the target audience that the designer was aiming for.

But I suppose that having the public set the Skill Level would help create better consistency for which skill levels are appropriate for which levels. For instance, we could get a new HATPC player come onto the site and upload a level that he thinks is super hard, so he sets the skill level to 5/5, but then our community plays it and it feels more like a 2/5.

But the same could happen vice versa. We start making levels for this new game, and then a more seasoned player logs on to find that the highest skill levels are overrated. We may also change our minds a few months later as we get more used to the game.

Just saying...but that can be done with any rating system.
"OMG THIS LEVEL IS AWSOME. 10/10 STARS, THIS LEVEL ROX." Imaginary quote from AeOnFrEaK2002, after playing a level like level_reborn_75.

You are overthinking it. The system will be balanced as time goes on.

The veterans are usually the one to set the standards, and I don't see why we couldn't do that in this case either. A lot of options aren't needed though, just 5 or so will be good, at least initially.

You could have these annotations appear in the level's thread with coordinates at the start. Something like:



And then people can respond to that.

So what do you think about the skill level idea? Should they replace/rename difficulty rates?

@jell, yeah that seems best. Maybe rather than showing a thread of annotations in the game, each annotation could instead link the post on the forums and have the link say "View Full Discussion."