Mega Man Level 1 v2 - ePortfolio Post

10/18/22

Mega Man Level 1 v2 - ePortfolio Post

This time around when making my Mega Man level, a lot more went right than last time and it was passable as a decent tutorial level. There is still a lot to change on my next level, but I have learned a lot more from creating the tutorial that will prepare me for the real levels. For what I did better in this level, I made it much longer and difficult enough for the players to learn their weapons and possibly die a few times while collecting the keys. To make it so that death was not a huge loss of progress, I put a checkpoint by every key so that if you died while exploring the level, you would not lose any of the already obtained keys. I thought this made the increase in difficulty justified, because even though it is much harder than it was before, it is not so difficult that it is unfun and even if you are killed while fighting, you will not lose a massive amount of progress, giving you the ability to fight enemies and practice your gunplay without having the fear of losing everything.

As for length, I added 3 doors that require 3 keys to open, and expanded the map outward to add areas where the players can collect the keys and learn to jump, fight, and slide better. As for design, I still kept the part at the beginning screen of the level that required you to learn to jump, shoot, and slide to get on to the bulk of the level, so that players learned the controls before being simply thrust into the game. I also improved the western style through the backgrounds, making cave areas and outdoor desert areas with different backgrounds that made the world seem a lot more full than it was previously. The critical path was not completely clear because the level was designed to be explorable, but the doors and end are shown in the beginning of the level up above you, which shows your final goal, and there are only a limited number of places you can go to look for keys. So no matter where the player goes, they are making progress, and will know from their previous progress where they can go next.

Since the end is shown at the beginning of the level, the player also knows exactly where to go once they had collected all the keys, even if they had not explored the upper cave area yet. As for circulation elements, I made a lot of stairs out of falling platforms to separate each of the areas from each other. This divided the level into all the key locations, the starting area, and the final ending area, which all of these branched out from a sort of empty space in the center that connected to all 5 of these areas.

As for what I did badly in the level, it was still a little bit on the shorter side even with all the additions to the level, but this is also because it isn’t being played by people who are new to Mega Man, which the level is designed for. Therefore, if the level was played by its target audience, then I feel like the players would take longer to grasp the controls and strategies and the level would end up being roughly 10-12 minutes. Therefore, I feel like I should fix the length on the level for the next one, since by that time even the new players will know how to play, so that it will take about 10 minutes to complete for people of a moderate skill level.