I remember playing Aqua Relic a few years back in the OLDC, and while it was pretty mediocre and had some issues with direction, a few rooms were quite interesting from an architectural standpoint. Serene Falls Zone is definitely an improvement in that regard. The direction issues are mostly gone, the rooms are much more solidly designed, and there were more sections that caught my interest than before.
The problem? Platforming is nice and everything (this
is a platforming game after all), but a lot of those levels felt like platforming for platforming's sake, and it got repetitive fast. In particular, you seemed almost obsessed with this particular part of THZ1:
Structures like this one appear over and over again in your levels, even though it's hardly one of the most interesting parts of THZ1. It's okay to incorporate something like this into your levels every once in a while, but the way you use them, you seem to think that the player will actively
enjoy climbing structures like this, when in fact... ehn. They're not interesting on their own. An interesting room has to offer a bit more than just a few platforms to climb.
There are sections in your levels where you're doing it absolutely right: I'm thinking in particular of the very first room of the first act, which has a lot of stuff on the sidelines for you to explore. In the overall progression of the level, it's not much more than a glorified corridor, but just by having some stuff for me to explore, it engaged me much more than pretty much anything else in the level. Another strong room was this one:
Not because it had a lot of action - it didn't. But unlike some many other parts of your level, here the gameplay is integrated into the architecture of the room. Just by putting that FOF there, you're dividing the room into vertical layers and making the player curious what's up there, and then when the player gets to the next layer, he feels a sense of accomplishment. It's very subtle - the player doesn't really notice this consciously - but small things like that make the difference between boring platforming and interesting platforming. The key is to make the player curious.
If you look at the THZ1 screenshot again, you immediately see that apart from the exit to the next room, there are also those ledges with spring shells in front of you (and there's more stuff in the room that you can't see from that screenshot). They immediately catch the player's eye and make him curious. You can already see from the position where I took the screenshot that this is
not the path forward. The star post is in plain sight, and it's somewhere else. But ideally, what you want as a level designer is for the player to make the conscious choice: "Okay, I know the star post is over there, but first I want to see what's up here." If you can get the player to postpone his progress for a while out of sheer curiosity, that's one way (and a particularly good way) to engage him.
Most parts of your levels aren't like that. You come into the room, you can see the exit, and there's a bunch of platforms between you and the exit. It's a matter of logistics, of getting from A to B. From the player's standpoint, that's totally uninteresting. He can already see everything that's ahead of him, so he's not curious. And since the challenge itself is so rudimentary, it winds up being boring. If you have challenges that are intrinsically interesting, you can get away with "obstacle course" design like this, but if you don't, you need to find other ways to engage the player. One way to do that is once course through hidden power-ups and the likes, another is to design the room in such a way that the player can't see all of it at once and feels like he has to "explore" the room to make progress.
Getting back to the specifics, there are some other sections in your levels I want to comment on in particular:
The opening room of act 2 has a very good underlying idea: The second bridge is immediately visible, but obviously way too high to be accessible. Immediately this makes the player interested. Later on when he crosses that room again, there's a sense of recognition and, again, accomplishment (although with how wide and high up the second bridge is, it's easy for the player to miss that this in fact the same room - the lower level isn't easily visible from up there). The problem? A room as large and empty as this absolutely SCREAMS "exploration!", yet you hardly put anything in it. The advantage of having large setpieces like this is that you can go absolutely nuts with hidden items and other additional content. The second bridge immediately catches the player's attention and, if that player is anything like me, he will be inclined to stay around a little while longer and explore that room. You should take advantage of that.
On the surface, this room is the same rudimentary platforming as everything else, but what makes it stands is the unusual architecture. Things like that, too, can engage the player. Other neat touches include the broken bridges in the latter part of act 2 and the weird bustable blocks that lead into the underwater part in act 1. The underwater part itself was sadly one of the weakest part of the level, just a bunch of empty corridors (except for the hidden emblem, which was easily the most fun thing in the map). It was also one of the few parts that still suffered from a lack of direction, mainly because a certain part of it goes in a circle for no good reason and has a tendency to naturally point me in the wrong direction.
So overall? There are some good ideas in your levels, but if you want to make something truly enjoyable, you need more than "some" good ideas. A truly enjoyable level must have something engaging in every single room, and a truly enjoyable level doesn't have rudimentary "filler" platforming. If you want to keep working on these levels in particular, I would advise you to go through the level, look at everything with a
very critical eye and outright delete everything that you don't think is interesting for the player (unless you have a concrete idea on how to make it interesting, in which case go ahead and rework it). It's incredibly important not to allow any subpar content to remain in your map. I know it's hard to delete something that you spent so much time working on, but it will massively improve the quality of your mapping, and too many promising mappers fail because they hesitate to delete the bad parts of their levels.
And when it comes to filling the gaps that will inevitably result, some of the things you should always have in mind are: "How can I engage the player? If the player is performing some action, is that action interesting enough on its own, and if not, how can I design the room to make it interesting anyway? Does my part of the level make the player curious when he sees it for the first time? If not, what can I add to it to make him curious? Do I give the player enough choices to make? If not, what can I add to give the player a choice, and how do I draw his attention to it?" You definitely have interesting ideas, and I think if you design an entire level with the conscious thought to make everything as interesting as possible, you can come up with something great.
