Dude's intro to basic level design principles

I think a fairly moderate level of understanding would suffice actually. It isn't like Sonic 2 was made with a staff of only highly experienced veteran level designers. But anyway, in the case of the spike, the best thing to do I'd say is warn about it in advance. Que it up with a line of three rings half a screen before to indicate the jump and then have three rings over the actual spikes as the visual cue to tell the player that they should have jumped at the end of the first line.

 

This represents one of the puzzle types I described above; pattern recognition. If a player is conditioned to jump for rings, they will jump for them. Simple.

 

Heres my set of rules for good level design (not repeating anything mentioned earlier in the thread):

* 1-ups are sacred. The best thing about sonic 1 and 2 is that you could make your own mini game by hunting for 100% 1-ups. They were placed strategically and never over-used (as in Sonic 3). Use only 1 or 2 (maximum 3) 1-ups per act and place them in places where they will only be found by people looking for them. There are so many secrets in Sonic 1 and 2 that people in this community don't even know about, or only know about due to level maps or debug. Everytime I netplay with someone they're always like "I didn't know about that". Hiding things provides years of re-play value. I'm still discovering things on platforms in the sky in emerald hill zone. And you can also pull an OOZ gimmick and place 1-ups where they can be seen from the main game path but not got easily from there.

* Don't try to hide the bottom or top of the level. Despite wanting to make your level look big, you should give the player a sense of location and distance. The best stuff is skirted along the tops and bottoms of the levels.

Maybe ill post more later. I'm not feeling well right now.

 

Indeed, I'm still trying to figure out how to get these monitors:



Are they truly unreachable or do I just suck?

 

Nah, you don't suck - these drove me nuts for years. I spent like four hours straight once exploring the whole level, even in debug mode, to catch the trick. It's pretty evil. Too bad we didn't have Zone: 0 back then to help us out: Scrap Brain Act 2