Hey all, a few people here might remember that I was a coder, tester, and avid custom level maker for SRB2 years back, but more-or-less quit in 2005. At the time, I was kind of burnt out on the whole thing and felt that the game would never get done. Now that I've finally played the current version with all the "new" single player levels introduced in 2009, I thought I'd share some feelings on it.
Overall, I'm really impressed at the scope of it with all the new levels, enemies, textures and game elements. The single player sequence was, on the whole, a heck of a lot of fun to play. I was clearly wrong to have written off SRB2's future.
Some elements of the level design, however, detract from the experience for me, and seem to crop up again and again:
Overall, I'm really impressed at the scope of it with all the new levels, enemies, textures and game elements. The single player sequence was, on the whole, a heck of a lot of fun to play. I was clearly wrong to have written off SRB2's future.
Some elements of the level design, however, detract from the experience for me, and seem to crop up again and again:
- The annoyance of missing a jump is too great. Often the player re-enters an area seen previously but from a higher altitude. Veering off the edge of a platform, or missing a single jump out of many, forces repeating a significant part of the level to climb back up. This isn't fun.
Worse, missing some jumps sends the player to an empty area, especially in Deep Sea Zone, where many deep pools of water contain nothing but sparse scenery, one or two enemies, and a lone spring or zoom tube the player has to hunt for in order to 'try again.' One example: in DSZ2, after the water currents, where you jump a sequence of floating platforms while the water level rises. Or what purpose does this serve from DSZ1?
In the classic games (e.g. Sonic 3 & Knuckles), sometimes falling off a platform makes you go back, but not as often. More commonly one of three things happens:- You rejoin an alternate, lower path through the level. This is my favorite, because it's seamless and keeps the game's momentum. Jumping correctly might lead to a path that is shorter, more fun or has more bonuses, but in this case it isn't required.
- Nothing really. Perhaps you fall into a shallow pit that you can jump right out of, or a spring is close by. If there's spikes, you lose your rings but get right back up.
- You die. Where a higher level of difficulty is intended, some of these falls should probably lead to death pits, including the DSZ2 example. Let 'em off easy or kill 'em, but don't just annoy them.
- Levels can be confusing, even maze-like. What seems like the path ahead can lead backwards to an earlier part of the level. This happens often in Deep Sea, Arid Canyon, and Castle Eggman, and a little in Egg Rock.
Let's not forget that Sonic is linear, start-to-finish. In the classic games this is easy to keep track of since you ultimately run from left to right. Temporary, right-to-left reversals tend to be pretty obvious: there are only two choices, after all.
In 3D, it's more complicated, but the player can rely on a common-sense notion: When there is a branch, to continue progressing through the level, you go forward, or turn as slightly as possible. If one path requires a much sharper turn than the others, it's likely not the intended way to go. And if two paths require an equal turn (say, 90 degrees left or 90 degrees right), they're both equally valid. Right?
Sadly, this principle is not always adhered to in SRB2's level design, leading to frustration. Other cues that can help clarify are sometimes missing. One good example is where the first two split paths converge in Arid Canyon, where it's obvious to head for the stack of conveyors... doing otherwise would require a full, 180 degree U-turn. The rope fence particularly helps, as it discourages jumping directly from one side to the other and going the wrong way.
But consider a not-so-great example from ACZ. After the cliffs with oil slicks and an attraction shield, you go up a red spring, through a hallway and down a stair-slope. At the bottom of this stair-slope is a confusing area (screenshot). There's a platform straight ahead, which suggests going straight. But the platform is not reachable, and that direction only leads backwards. There's also a platform slightly on the right, but it's isolated and contains only some rings, no way to proceed. The correct path is a 90 degree left turn, very counterintuitive on a first run through the level. It seems like putting a rope fence here would really help.
Several other areas of ACZ confused me at first, though it's hard to remember where now that I've replayed it so many times.
In a few places, the way to proceed through the level is bizarre and hidden:- In CEZ1, a sequence of wooden platforms leads to... a closed gate. To proceed, you have to deliberately fall off the platforms into a lake, and find currents leading to an underwater tunnel.
- Most of the windows in ERZ2 are only for scenery. But at one point, you're going through a hallway and you suddenly have to make a 90 degree left turn, exit through a small window, and jump up some platforms. It seems illogical and anyone not used to this transition is going to go straight ahead, hitting a dead end.
- Later in ERZ2, there's a mostly empty room where you jump into a glass tube on the wall which takes you briefly outside, then back in at another end. Then you go into a tiny, claustrophobic passageway, hidden behind some crates (which rarely fails to get the camera stuck). This has never made any sense to me.
These weird passages would make sense for hiding emerald tokens, invincibility monitors or the like. As a regular part of the level, they just kill the momentum. Sure, finding where to go is an added challenge, in a sense - but mazes are about getting people lost; Sonic is about fast action. On the classic games, you don't get lost like this.
- Some stages feel too much like obstacle courses. I'm especially thinking of Egg Rock, which I'm surprised got designed the way it is under Mystic's leadership, because it violates a principle of game design that he himself articulated to me once. That is: don't max out the difficulty constantly, because it isn't fun. You want to have parts of a level that are hard, and parts of a level that are relatively easy, offering relief.
As I recall, Mystic's analogy (maybe borrowed from an article) went like this: consider a horror movie that consists of people screaming and being chased by zombies, nonstop, for two hours. That would be a crappy movie. After about five minutes, the adrenaline fades and you just get bored. But if you have a few, well-placed zombie chase scenes, and the rest of the movie is people walking through dark corridors, scared spitless about whether they're really safe or not and where the next zombie is going to show up, then you've got a good movie. Well, ERZ2 is about four hours of constant zombie chases.
Admittedly, Egg Rock is the last zone, so if it's ever appropriate to stack up so many death traps in a row, it's here. I'm not even quibbling with the level of difficulty per se, though it's plainly beyond anything in the classic games. It's the way the difficulty is presented, so unrelentingly. Compare Wing Fortress, or Death Egg act 2 from Sonic & Knuckles. Between one trap and the next, you still get plenty of running, jumping, and straight-up platformer action - the joy of movement that makes Sonic so fun to begin with. It isn't out of one room-o'-doom and into the next, constantly. At no point in either act of Egg Rock can I really let my guard down, even for a moment, at best there is a trap that's slightly less deadly than the other traps, and on top of that, act 2 is absurdly long.
But there's another way the levels feel like obstacle courses that's more subtle, and also applies to some of the earlier zones, like Deep Sea and Castle Eggman. Instead of the zones feeling continuous, I'm very conscious of moving from one "room" to the next, each room with a specific focus: In this room you jump from platform to platform. In that room you go around riding up the moving platforms. And so on. The classic games were sometimes like this, but you usually breeze on through and don't notice it; you don't have to stay in one room for like 20-30 seconds or more, the way you do in, say, the first big underwater area in DSZ1.
Part of this obstacle course feel may just be, well, an over-reliance on obstacles. DSZ2 and ERZ2 feel like a designer's playground for testing game ideas. Some of the gimmicks are quite fun, most are at least pretty good, but they're too much and they start to slow things down, crowding out the basic gameplay. (And the DSZ2 room full of bust-up blocks just sucks.) More thought should be given to overall flow and keeping up the momentum. It could also help to minimize right angles and add more heterogeneity (varying floor heights, textures, types of hazards) within areas that feel too much like discrete rooms. Mystic Realm was generally very good in this respect. - There are some small, claustrophobic passageways that tend to constrain movement and get the camera stuck. A couple of old examples are the path to the emerald token in GFZ1, and the "secret" area encased in glass at the beginning of THZ2 - way too tiny. Now there's also a couple hallways in ERZ2 that you have to go through that get the camera stuck: the one behind the crates, and the one after the conveyors. All of these would be better off not so narrow; yeah, even the "secret" ones, cuz they're still part of the game. This ain't Doom, it's Sonic!
