CONTEXT
The King’s Bird is a precision platformer on which I worked as a level designer, and it is a hard game. Players run, jump, walljump, and glide through levels attempting to smoothly traverse increasingly deadly environments.
A major goal of the game’s design is to challenge players to really master the deep movement mechanics in order to solve taxing platforming problems.
The game also tracks and prominently displays how long the player took to complete each level. The design goal behind this was to incentivize players to replay levels to improve their times, hopefully adding replayability and even encouraging speedrunning.
THE PROBLEM
Naturally, the worst case scenario for this sort of game would be for players to find the game tedious or frustrating…
Which is exactly the sort of feedback I got on some key levels in the game. Forget replayability, playtesters were tapping out and quitting these levels on their first time through them.
In the absolute worst cases, large chunks of level geometry had to be redone, taking designers’ time away from creating new levels and even sometimes forcing artists to go back and implement new art in accordance with the new designs.
The team could have buckled down and redone work on all of these problem-levels, but I saw a simple, efficient solution that made the levels better for players while accomplishing the game’s goals without any large redesigns or redone art:
Better checkpoints.
The way checkpoints initially worked in the game was that each level included a few key checkpoints that separated out the level’s major beats. A common example of this was for levels to have two or three checkpoints splitting the level into beginning, middle, and end. For some levels this worked quite well, but for others it proved problematic, because multiple tough platforming challenges got stacked into a single section in between checkpoints. What seemed to be causing frustration in my playtesters was that while they enjoyed the game’s mechanics and were excited about seeing new and novel challenges presented by the level design, they hated having to replay difficult sections they’d been through before just for an opportunity to see a brand new challenge.
Levels in The King’s Bird can demand some trial and error as players test out possible ways to safely gain the momentum required to progress through them. My players loathed having to do half a minute of white-knuckle platforming in order to get another shot at their latest challenge. What seemed like a natural choice in checkpoint placement to preserve the overall pacing of these levels was causing playtesters to outright reject them, so a significant change in philosophy was required.
My solution was to stop placing a few checkpoints based on the major sections of the level, and instead to place a checkpoint after each major challenge the level presented (I’ll elaborate further on this in a moment). This way, a player would only have to complete a given platforming section a single time on their way through the level. Many levels in The King’s Bird are tough enough that this didn’t trivialize the game by any means, it just let players tackle one challenge at a time without frustration.
This meant levels had often significantly more checkpoints, but required no overly-large reworks to the level designs themselves.
Making this change was also quite quick and I was able to get versions of these levels with new checkpoints in front of players on their very next testing session.
Here’s an example using a primitive mockup of one of the levels in The King’s Bird. The level’s start and end points are shown as a green “S” and “E”. If the player touches a red area they are killed and sent back to the furthest checkpoint they’ve reached. Checkpoints are marked by green triangles, and a fairly typical player’s path through the level is marked by blue lines.
While at first blush this allocation of checkpoints might make some sense for a level like this, in practice players disliked it. The first three big glides across the stage at the level’s start required players to demonstrate a serious mastery of the gliding mechanic immediately, and be forced to start the sequence over if they messed up. The same is true of the level as a whole: If the player made an error, there was usually some amount of the level they were forced to replay. Thanks to the overall high difficulty of the game, my playtesters simply found this unacceptable.
This is the same level design with an overhaul of the checkpoints. New checkpoints are shown as fully filled-in green triangles.
The total number of checkpoints has gone from 2 to 8. This simple revision has a significant impact on the overall feel of the level, since with more checkpoints the player is only ever expected to complete a single platforming challenge at a time and can therefore afford to experiment and try novel solutions without fear of failure leading to punishment.
THE OUTCOME
In the end, playtesters gave up on levels prematurely much more rarely, and on their end-of-session questionnaire they didn’t cite frustrations with level difficulty nearly as much.
One negative piece of feedback I occasionally received was that even though the levels remained difficult, the checkpoints felt overly gracious and plentiful for such a tough game. I decided however, that this trade-off was more than worth it since most players didn’t indicate any dissatisfaction with the checkpoints, and after making these changes players were generally much more willing to spend time working their way through even the game’s hardest levels.
Here is a two-minute clip of popular Youtuber Mark Brown (of Game Maker’s Toolkit fame) playing this exact level of The King’s Bird. In this clip he fails at least once on almost all of the individual platforming challenges, but being rewarded with a checkpoint every time he completes one affords him the safety to test out ideas for getting past the next section without punishment. He even starts to talk through his hypotheses out loud, and seems to have had a good time!
Similarly, here is a clip of someone speedrunning the hardest level in the entire game. I think mastery like this could only be reasonably achieved with the help of an unobtrusive checkpoint system that is fair and encouraging towards players trying over and over again.
