Hitting An Upper Limit (Patreon)

As you might have heard, the second bonus level was originally three times the length. I wanted to explore as many "advanced" concepts as I could, but the resulting level length would end up being terrible for pacing. So, I took the first third of the level (which also had the most polished rooms) and converted that to the level present in the demo.

The room in the GIF isn't even one of those cut rooms- it was actually removed earlier than that! I'd like to use this post to go into the detail as to why this one room was so problematic.

The concept for this room is fairly simple: you have to build downwards momentum while jumping off of crumble slopes to beat a falling platform. What isn't so simple is executing this sequence, due to mechanics that aren't immediately visible.

Firstly, in order to keep your downwards speed and continue accelerating, the player needs to hold down in order to fast fall the entire time. Not holding down would mean losing to the falling platform and being pushed into the sawblades. If I wanted to keep this room, then I would have to teach fast falling in the level design. Even though the level was already fairly long, I thought that this room was so cool that it'd be worth it.

The result of not holding down.

Secondly, the player needs to have high enough horizontal speed to go from platform to platform and avoid the sawblades in the middle. This isn't as simple as tapping jump, as that would cut the jump short and limit the penguin's horizontal speed to the normal air horizontal cap. Instead, the player needed to hold jump, because the jump velocity from the wall allows the penguin to bypass that horizontal speed cap. This would also require teaching the player to hold out wall jumps, which again, I was willing to do, because this is a cool room, right?

The result of not holding jump

(Thirdly, it doesn't help that no other falling platform behaves like this in the game. I put an invisible trigger below the bomb blocks in order to make this scenario possible.)

Well, even after tutorializing both fast falling and wall jump velocity, it still wasn't enough, as playtesters couldn't figure out this room. I needed even more space and time to build up to this single sequence. While this challenge level was all about exploring difficult slope physics scenarios, nothing was quite as complex as this single room. To make matters worse, the level had grown even longer, and now virtually unplayable due to the pacing issues. So... yeah, I had to remove this room and all of the rooms building up to it, as they just didn't fit in the challenge level.

I still do like the concept of this room, so maybe it'll find it's way into a new challenge level in the future :)