Here's a "death trap" level I made in my programming class. We had to animate the faces of the blocks to light up/change depending on what it was doing.
The eyes start off as grey, turn yellow when you activate the trigger and turn red when it goes to attack you. When it's going back to it's original position they turn blue.
I didn't want to make a super long level, but it's a little challenging at least. The ending is also not rewarding, on purpose. Because it's a death trap.
For my platform game I'm designing in my Game Design II class, I wanted to make something that would be simple yet fun. A lot of the games we demoed were just too hard which I think takes a lot of fun out of games. The idea is to make a game that is 3 minutes long, and hopefully there's just enough challenges in mine that allows the player to complete it in that amount of time.
The story behind mine is that you're a pirate and you have to make it from your ship (the starting point) to the sinking enemy ship, and find their hidden treasure room.
The large gap between the two sets of platforms is supposed to symbolize the gap between the two ships- and the rest is just mostly jumping puzzles with a few moving platform challenges.
If the game proves to be too easy, I'm going to add more obstacles like cannon balls being fired and maybe more traps (spikes).
Bit trip runner does an interesting take on tutorial levels- they basically break it down into 5 levels which are all about a minute long. Each level teaches you the basics, then provides you with a level in between the skill learned and the next one, to practice.
They continuously build up on previous skills learned with repetitive landscapes and obstacles to (lightly) challenge the player at the start. Obviously level 6 will be much more challenging than level 1.
They start to include different obstacles too, instead of just jumping over rocks, you start to jump over gaps, or slide under moving objects rather than sliding under stationary rocks. On top of all this, you're challenged to collect the gold bars and the special power ups, which don't add anything to the game other than points and a change in music/visuals.
If the player manages to get all of the gold coins/bars in the level, they are awarded with a bonus level in order to get even more points.
There isn't much of a story to this game, which is perfectly fine. It has other nice aspects that keep the player interested.
Here is a breakdown of the fifth level which includes all of the abilities combined. I decided to do the level that includes ALL of the abilities rather than just jumping because it seemed more interesting and is still considered a tutorial level.
