Well, the difficulty is far more approachable than Jumper Returns, which works in your favor. With that said, I didn't find the chapter very compelling because a lot of the levels felt really empty and boring. All of the levels feel incredibly boxed in and don't have any interesting structure, you have to vary the geometry a bit in order to surprise the player instead of only having cube and rectangle shapes for every stage. Also, you should add details outside of the map instead of having this empty sky looming in the distance and nothing else. Your chapter definitely needs some more eyecandy.
Yes, the chapter is easier than Jumper Returns, that was my intention.
You can be right about the minimalistic touch of all levels, but as I explained in the first post of this thread, it was my choise. I knew many ppl were going to dislike that :P.
Also, stuff like the keys and some obstacles are way too small and detract from the gameplay. What's with the miniature rocket launchers on Level 3? I didn't even expect these to shoot at me due to their size. You usually should never shrink or enlarge shooter objects too much.
Al the objects were resized to 0.6, including Bandage Girl. Maybe is quite small, I'll keep this in mind.
Gameplay-wise, the difficulty is usually fine and some levels were enjoyable (I remember "The Ninja" being fun to play), but others just rely on making the level way too long or featuring excessive backtracking. "The Maze" in particular was absurd; your par time was 113 seconds! The longest level in the main game had a par time of 70 seconds (6-3x) and even then it didn't take that long to beat if you knew what you were doing. Not to mention that most of the gameplay involved running in empty hallways, which isn't interesting.
The only "long" level is The Maze. My real par time on that map is 79 secs. I just made the par 113 to give a more realistic time to the lvl. I realised that not everyone is used to play with Ogmo, so in most levels par time's are increased on purpose.
I think that seeing Ogmo running is pretty fun, thats why I made the long hallways xD.
Level 6 also didn't felt great; never use trial-and-error gameplay if you can afford it. Not to mention the level loses all of its purpose when you find the "correct" answer.
I'll keep this in mind, even though I think is quite funny to die randomly with Ogmo sometimes ^^.
I don't really like the blind jump gimmick you have in levels like 13 and 20, these don't make for very fun stages. Even though these stages are pretty big, there's not a lot happening in them.
True. Maybe I can put some more obstacles in this lvls in some future update of the chapter.
In overall, it's not a bad first attempt at a chapter, but you need to work a little bit more on the way your levels look to make them more interesting to the player. You might also benefit from trying to make your levels smaller, which may help making them a bit more memorable and distinct. Good luck on your next chapter!
Really wise suggestions. I'm an engineer, so you can imagine my mind is a little boxed sometimes. You can find boring things but at least no errors or weird bugs :P As I said in the first post, every level was tested like 30 times before they went to SMW. Engineering crazy stuff xD
I'll try to make lvls more interesting visually next time :)
Thank you very much for your time trying my chapter and for you cool suggestions.
Greetings from Argentina,
Javier
Super Meat Boy
