UPDATE 2

May 13, 2016

Seed of Life is a meditative game in which you deflect colourful elements to create sacred patterns.

Catch up on what the game is in this post.

I’m trying to narrow down the final level count on Challenge mode. This is the only mode right now I’m confident in. The other two modes need a bit of reworking - which I’ll explore in my next update.

For now, here’s what I need to do to finish Challenge mode for Seed of Life.

Challenge Mode

Challenge mode has fixed level compositions that escalate in difficulty. The goal of each level is to successfully deflect all incoming elements, thus forming a unique pattern. Missing an element will rewind the wave to the beginning. It is very much inspired by the game Duet, where beating a level requires complete mastery over that level.

For this mode, I need to create/curate 50-100 levels that:



Have amazing looking patterns

Utilise each of the game’s projectile types / properties / mechanics in roughly equal measure

Are arranged by difficulty, with a steady introduction of said mechanics



I’ve generated almost a thousand levels with my level generator, and there were some very striking looking patterns that came about from this. Due to the way the generator works, these won’t satisfy the 2nd point, and the 3rd point is difficult for the system to really quantify (there ARE ways to measure a level’s difficulty, but it’s only an estimate and really requires human input to gauge properly).

So, I figured the first step to getting through this huge amount of content I needed was to cherry pick the best-looking patterns from the level generator. Thanks to the 3+ hour stream on Twitch I did not too long back where an AI played through all of my generated levels - and that the game is programmed to take automatic screenshots at the end of each level - my screenshots folder was full of levels ripe for the taking. So was my twitter, thanks to the auto-twitter poster I had in there too.

For step two, I had to manually play through these 100 chosen levels. Prior, I would have a bot I wrote play through them so I could collect screenshots and data such as time taken. It could obviously not collect data for how long a human would actually take to beat it and the number of attempts to do so - so playing it myself was a necessary step. I quickly arranged my levels by these two metrics, and thus came up with a rough order of difficulty. In addition, I would have other users play the game and gather their data to see how things might be adjusted slightly.

The final step would see me attempt to satisfy the 2nd point noted above. For this, I would need to:

Tailor the level generator to create levels specifically with projectile behaviours that are under-represented, and then repeat the above process of cherry picking them.



Manually come up with waves that utilise said projectile behaviours.

This needs a few iterations of level generating, level creating, playtesting, ordering levels around, cutting levels, and repeat. In doing this, I would eventually complete the final level count for Challenge mode.

Summary

I’m completely happy with the way things work for this mode. The structure and content type is completely locked in, and my only concern for it is to ensure the levels play well, steadily introduce mechanics, and end with a beautiful and satisfactory pattern.

My biggest concerns come with the other modes - but that will be for another update!