Level building nostalgia

Something about the idea of creating levels and actually creating levels is hard to follow through on. I look forward to trying out some puzzle making when Valve releases the level editor for Portal. Most recently I last spent a bit of my time in the Little Big Planet level creator and had some fun with it's physics system. For me this all steams back to a time ago that I was playing my share of Doom over the local BBS and using ID Software's tools to make more arenas to share with my friends. Then I think even before that, one of the first computers I was lucky to have as a grade school kid, I had a copy of a game called Jetpack. This was a solid game with some very challenging levels and a lot of dying. I spent so much time just mastering and over thinking the creation of one level I couldn't imagine having to create dozens, or a hundred.

I started this time with some good old white board drawings of levels that will help the player progress and get use to the control I want to propose in this game. In addition to my existing placement tools I have in Flash, I'm was going to employ the use of Tiled to handle the nature of tile block maps. This was a great fast start for getting the prototype made and the feel for the game. I must have played that first level design 100 times getting the input right. Then it came time to build a couple more, and quickly I find myself running out of ideas. I need to have my friends and family help, even if they just messed around with the block to create some forms I wouldn't have thought up. I then remember I'll have to get these few people Flash, and Tiled, and teach them how to use the two apps, and no thats not going to work.

Back when I was making Petunk I came to a point where I was going to make a levels in XML code, in game builder, or just some type of layout sheet. Saving myself time I came up with the layout classes in Flash, but at the cost of not making that part of the game. It's got me to wonder how much of the game is the desire to create levels. I wish I had someones numbers here, it would help me decide if thats a sales perk. The developer from jetpack claims it's one of the most popular features, Little Big Planet I'm sure is thriving on user created content. Even Gary from Bouncy Ball Games may have a lot of users that prefer to make levels over playing them. So this time around I'm leaning toward making a easy to use level editor and see what user created content can do for a game. Partially because I want to see if a larger fan following would get onboard earlier to submit levels for the games release like JoyrideLabs.de is doing. Or if serving up downloadable levels helps retain users long after the packaged levels get completed. At this point I'm a long way off but I will try to make a series of this experiment as I hit the milestones of my jetpack version of an iOS game.