One of the members of our team (@shadoninja) said of our level design,

"Make the level so we can beat it trivially, and that will be the right difficulty level for everyone else."

That is not to say that everyone else is not as good as we are at playing games, it is just to point out that after hours and hours play testing our game over and over, we will inevitablly be better at it then the average person who picks up our game for the first time. We know where the next platform will be, we know how long it will take for the black hole to reach us, and we have mastered the physics of the movement mechanic. Making a level for someone who doesn't have that experience is hard to do. And really, we did make an effort at every step of design to make our game as accessible as possible to everyone who played it. But to be honest, even with that in the front of our minds, I think we still made our game too hard.

It isn't so much that we wanted to make the game easy for everyone, just to make it accessible. When someone tries out our game for the first time, I'd like to see them complete it. We put a ton of effort into the beginning and end of our game, and I don't have full confidence that everyone will get to enjoy that last part.

I believe the main reason for this is that after someone dies for the first time and is brought back to the menu screen to start the game over from the very beginning, they become immediately deflated. Unfortunately, we weren't able to get a checkpoint system into the game before the deadline. Which means, every time someone died, they had to start from scratch.

Every. Single. Time.

I imagine that after starting from the beginning more than a time or two, the player will just give up and chalk it up to "That game was too hard" and then move on to the next game without ever having reached the final ending. :cry:

After the deadline, I decided to put some effort into creating a checkpoint system (pictured above). I made it so that if you reached a specific area (green circles), that on death, you would spawn back to that point and the black hole would spawn somewhere (pink line) along the path (teal line) behind you. Watching someone play this version of the game was much more satisfying. There was no longer the deflating sensation of losing ALL of your progress. It turned stress and frustration into fun.

All of this to say, taking away progression from a player should be a technique used extremely sparingly in a game. We missed the opportunity to make our game truly accessible this time around. But hopefully we will take what we've learned and apply it for the next jam.

Thank you for reading, and please play our game: Eventful Horizon