Hello, I am just at the stage of planning out my levels on paper(I''m making a 2d game so I can do that), and I am wondering, are there any disadvantages of not having the levels go from the easiest to the hardest in order? What if I have them mixed up, so that the player sometimes would get an easy level, and then a really hard level right after. Would that be ok? Because after developing 30 or even perhaps more levles, I don''t think I would be in shape of deciding which is easier and which is harder(right now I am level 17) because I am the creator of the levels, they all seem easy to me. I guess I could ask some friends to play the game and tell me which levels they think are challenging, but I''m just wondering if it is ok to mix the levels around so that the player would have an extra element of surprise, he/she would not know what difficulty lies ahead and that could be interesting. Any thoughts welcome! Thanks.

It depends how long your game will take to play through. If it''s going to take an hour or more per level, then it''s probably best to just keep the difficulty increasing through the game.

If the levels only take a minute or so each, you want to follow harder levels with easier ones to give the player a chance to recover.

The basic idea is that no-one can play (or do anything else for that matter) at peak efficiency for very long at a stretch. By following a basic pattern of increasing difficulty gradually, then having a sudden drop before increasing again from the drop, but making each repitition a little more difficult (over longer games you may want to run the pattern on a larger scale) you challenge the player, but you also give them a chance to relax a little and recover without having to walk away from your game. Also, if you have more advanced techniques, the time to introduce them is in a relatively easy level following a series of levels of increasing difficulty that test the player''s mastery of more basic techniques.

Besides, if your player knows (possibly unconsciously) that completing a really hard level will be rewarded with an easier level following, they''re more likely to put in the effort to complete the hard level than if they expect the next level to be even harder.

Of course, if you don''t actually know which levels are easier or harder, then the best you can do is order them by the techniques they require, so that new techniques are introduced throughout the game. This doesn''t mean that, for example, if you have 3 techniques, introduced in levels 1, 11 and 21 of 30 that none of the levels after level 11 can''t use only the first technique, only that all of the first ten must not rely on either of the other techniques. Also, the last level should probably require as many techniques as possible in order to complete so as to represent as much of the game''s experience as possible.

If your levels do require a long time to complete, then you need to consider that in your design and make sure they don''t require the player to be operating at peak throughout an entire level.

Thanks so much for the info. I get it, my game is a mix between puzzle and action. So the amount of time it takes to complete a level can range from 5 - 30 minutes.

Hello.

I think you should be careful if you plan to mix hard levels and easy levels, because the player can finish a hard level almost dead and without ammo and recover it in the next level (the easy one), so the whole game would become easier.
Instead, if the difficulty is progressive, the player will try to keep his life and not to waste the ammo, because he''ll need both of them in the next level(s).


theNestruo

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