Reviewing my Levels

I did not do much today, but today I noted several changes I need to make to my existing levels.

See this level above? It's the level that introduces a new gameplay feature to the player: Doors. I put a text that hints to the player that the doors' colour codes are not just for fun. I wanted them to know that only the boy turtle can use blue doors, and the girl turtle can use pink doors.

I even put a lock on the pink door because I intentionally wanted to force my testers to enter the blue door with the girl turtle and realise they could not.

Unfortunately, BOTH my testers did not come to that conclusion, asking me respectively:

"37 something wrong?"
"pink door 2nd time cant pass"

"O.o
why one guy can enter the door why one can't
is there a gender difference?"


So apparently, my level failed to do what it was supposed to do. I plan to introduce brown and blue doors in the first level, and for pink doors, I shall introduce them in the level after that, and THIS time, I will only put PINK doors in the level after that, and I will intentionally make it such that the player will USE the pink door with player 1, because player 2 will spawn at a difference place as player 1. ^^

I'm sure the design for the new door level will work, I hope. And I will remove pink doors from this level 36. Seems that introducing too many things at once is kind of bad. I did not expect design issues such as this one to appear, but I am really very very thankful to my testers, Li Hao and Han! If only I had more critical testers. Maybe someone can actually figure out the reason behind the doors' colour codes before I explain it to them. I need to improve on my level design so much more since this game is more about communicating with the player than showing the instructions page.

Things I've done today:
- Improved level editor: Fixed some issues with spikes being deleted even when they are not connected to a platform, Doors now have to be placed on the ground, and will be deleted if the ground below it is deleted.
- Drew the proper sprites and added animation for the GIRL turtle (sprites have to be improved, because Li Hao thinks they still look weird, same with the boy turtle)
- I've also taken a look at some of the save/load features of other games' level editors. I don't think I'm going to use any of those that I've seen though (I've only seen one actually, because I forgot what other games I played before came with level editors).