Difference between revisions of "Candy Panic"

That is an incredibly confusing tileset. It's reeeally unclear what's solid and what isn't. Besides that, uhh...it feels like you focused way more on aesthetics than gameplay. The level design is just weird and 'there'. There's no real difficulty curve, it's just...stuff. The Guts lift rides are extremely easy and the one on the cave path you can just stand there and the Tellies will never hit you. There's empty stretches of land where the only enemy in your way is a Komasuboro. Then suddenly a Metal Man fight at the end except there's no conveyor belt so any semblance of difficulty just evaporates into thin air. The level is just really bizarrely designed and you'll probably only get hit ever by random surprise enemies like the Crazy Cannon at the start. It's a bleh level overall.

First of all, why is there a 1-up at the beginning of the level? You know those refill your health so it has no use, right? :P Anyway, this was a really fun level! It felt very casual, a nice stroll through a land of candy. I liked how you made a split path, but I don't think there was enough difference in the gameplay between the two. One was vertical and one was horizontal, but both sections were basically riding Guts Lifts over pits/spikes. Maybe keep the Guts Lifts in the vertical section and use another gimmick (like the falling rocks) in the cave section. Also, the graphics in the beginning didn't really look good and it was hard to tell what you could walk through and what you had to slide through. Still, the design was good and it played well as a Mega Man level!

This level seems to take a lot of its inspiration from MM1. However, at the same time it seems to only look at that inspiration at a surface level. It takes its assets and proposes a similar structure without looking deeper and figuring out what kind of design was used to make these classic levels fun to play. As a result, this level throws around enemies without much thought, has a split path where one side is much shorter, and resorts to text in order to explain some of its mechanics, which is something you never wanna have to do as a designer. Toxic chocolate wouldn't even harm Mega Man because he's steel type too so what even?!? Jokes aside, I found this level to be rather irritating. I questioned its decisions on almost every screen, where the sections in which I didn't do so felt like they were ripped straight out of a classic title.

I'm not really sure what to say about this level. I liked how it looked but that's about it. It's honestly pretty boring, the level design is nothing special... I genuinely don't have a lot to say about this one. It's just a standard generic level.

I guess this level was trying to ape the tropes of Mega Man 1? That.. is a rather bad game to emulate for a level design contest, especially since that game's tropes were pretty lackluster compared to the rest of the series.

This level was pretty dull, with the only interesting segment being the vertical climb on the Guts Man Lifts - and not by much, but I do think the enemies chosen there were appropriate in placement and challenge. The rest of this level does nothing. It is almost entirely enemies and enemies by themselves are boring, especially when the bare minimum of thought is put into their placement. The caverns were especially dull. You didn't even use one of the primary features of the Guts Man Lift!

Another, rather major issue, is the tile set. It's not bad to look at and it's been well tiled.. but.. it actively hinders the level. Here's what I mean: The tileset seems to have functions to actively confuse the player. I'm not sure how the cake frosting is supposed to look like something you can slide through... because it does not look that way at all. Additionally, spikes in the level - do not look like spikes. They seriously blend in with the background, and even after I had realised they were spikes, I still jumped into them because they are so similar to the rest of the surroundings, your mind just sort of forgets what they look like. Instant death hazards really need to stand out. The ""poison chocolate"" gimmick, is... just... stupid. If it acts like spikes, it should probably BE spikes, because there is no visual difference between the poison chocolate and regular chocolate. Having a sign to tell the player that this thing will suddenly kill them is really poor game design.

I was also very disappointed by your signature Robot Master not turning up. After having him taunt the player throughout the stage, you've pretty much wasted any goodwill the player would've had with your level concept, and used a dev-kit boss instead. A dev-kit boss who doesn't even make SENSE in your stage. Ending the level how you did, might just be worse than not having a proper climax at all, actually.