I'm unsure what kept me from doing so up until now, but I just sat down and read the entirety of this thread, and thought up a bunch of responses to everyone's thoughts. I spent an hour on that response, but then I just deleted it, out of feeling more like a nay-sayer than problem-solver. I will, however, leave up the one part about level length, as I felt there's a few nuggets of wisdom in that issue.
Hey Jude by the Beatles and Captain Jack by Billy Joel are both around 7 minutes in length. Both are awesome songs (in my book). Captain Jack has four verses, about eight lines apiece, just enough to paint the picture of a different aspect of this going-nowhere pothead's life before getting to the chorus. It's a slightly down-tempo, but simple tune for being 7 minutes, and I think I knew all the lyrics within a matter of weeks of hearing it for the first time. After the last chorus repeats for a second time, Billy ad-libs and fades. 7:18. Not a second wasted. Hey Jude has four really, really concise verses and two mid-length bridges, and moves at an upbeat pace. The actual song is done at about three minutes, ten seconds in, then Paul ushers in an entirely-too long coda that starts out triumphant but ultimately tests my patience after about two minutes of it, because I know there's going to be another two before it's over. 7:08. And it feels a lot longer than Captain Jack, simply because it took a strong element and wore it out into redundancy.
S3&K was not a victim to this too-long-for-its-own-good problem as a game, but rather on a stage-by-stage level. Sandopolis, everyone cites as being too long, but they really mean too hard. It's a challenge, but it's never redundant. Let's look at Act 2. There's a stretch where you mostly have to worry about racing the little lever-activated gates before time runs out and they close, while finding time to hit the lights to keep the ghosts at bay. Then after they tried some different orientations and inversions of that trick (by throwing in different obstacles, all also tailored for that zone), they move on to those little sand corks. Bust 'em lose and the place fills up like an hourglass. You can hit that light switch to keep from getting ghost-maimed if you want, but you'll run the risk of getting trapped in the upper chamber where that is. And then, it opens up to a looser and freer area, where it's standard platforming until you get to a puzzle which you have to figure out using your knowledge of all the gizmos that you've seen
in that zone, tailored
for that zone, sharing a visual and functional motif
with that zone.
It all goes back to what Locit said in that topic that Isuka linked to. Your levels are not "too long" until you run out practical applications for all its components, gizmos, baddies, obstacles, etc. How about Carnival Night Zone? Anyone else hate that dump? It's all lights and cool stuff, and circus music, and balloons you can bounce off of, and bumpers, and rotating cylinders you have to ride or avoid, and cannons, and huge, rotating meshed columns you can ride up and down and... well, that's just what you see in the first 30 seconds. But, really, that's all you see in that stage. Its second act probably isn't much longer than Sandopolis' second act, but you're already dealing with reruns in your scenery. So Knuckles turns the lights off.
Big deal. It's just as boring in the dark. How many circles of three bumpers did I have to fight through? Dunno, lost count. How many of those little soda-can-lookin' badniks that shoot off blue sparks did I have to get by? Sorry, those memories are too damn repressed to say. And how many times did I go through a wall, hit a special ring, do the special stage, but then fall through the floor and have to replay the last godforsaken two minutes of stage over again?! Way. Too. Many.
You sit down, you come up with a stage complete with all the different components, gizmos, baddies, obstacles, etc., and draft up all their implementations—on some level, you already know how long your stage is gonna be, ballpark. You exceed that, the zone suffers. Of course, if you don't come up with specific items for each stage, you run the risk of making (read: you
will make) a game that is, itself, redundant. One of Shadow's most glaring flaws is the biggest difference between most of the levels was the color of the walls.
Of course, Sandopolis was at an advantage because its first act was relatively different from the first. One of the things I liked about Sonic 3 & Knuckles was the progression within each zone. In Sonic 1 & 2, the whole act thing seemed to be just a way of making three different levels with the same scenery, but in Sonic 3 & Knuckles took on an idea which wound up being very adrenaline-pumping. Change up the scenery on the way through. Like when that robot set Angel Island Zone on fire. Or when Mushroom Hill started drying out. Or when the active volcano in Lava Reef cooled off, and then suddenly took a Death Egg blast and became active again.
SA1 took a very proactive stab at this by giving each level different act-esque segments. There's rooftop Speed Highway, running down a building Speed Highway, and street level Speed Highway. Hell, it was barely the same level at the end of it, but since it kept the same components (cop car baddies, shattering glass floors, etc.), it wasn't too obtrusive. I think that's what's hurting a lot of the current stages; they come in one flavor and one flavor only. The water level concept is played out, yes, but if you can do something interesting with it, over the course of it, then I'm listening.
In fact, I have an idea. Check it out.
Let's just say for the sake of this example, the cast is Sonic, Tails, Knuckles & Rouge. (There could be more, but just for this example, there aren't.)
Start out on the beach, run along the shore and the pier (with, as previously indicated, a bunch of shore, beach and pier-relevant enemies, obstacles and all). But then, get swept away by a horrible storm, and use a piece of the pier to surf/boat/raft through it, if you're Sonic or Tails, who don't do so great with water. If you're Knuckles or Rouge, you swim underwater and find a secret underwater base. When the storm settles, Sonic and Tails find themselves in a fleet full of Eggman-infested ships. There's obviously a main ship with the big-ass Eggman logo they're trying to get to, but they have to do so by battling their way through the little ships, first. Knuckles and Rouge will instead, infiltrate the underwater base, then finally find a torpedo launcher that'll launch them into the entrance of the big ship Sonic and Tails just found an entrance to. And then, when the player finishes, boss time.
(The only reason this wouldn't work with the characters I've described is that Rouge is too similar to Knuckles, and their runs through the game would likely always play identical to one another. But twas just an example.)
- Hey, look, a diagram!
- dacksleveldesign.gif (41.44 KiB) Viewed 12222 times
Mind you, I mean "act" in more of the SA1 sense, where the music takes on a different arrangement and subgenre (but the melody remains), the scenery changes, but it's still the same level. No "act cleared" screen and music, just a segue into the next part. Also, the level-specific elements stay constant. For instance, the crab enemies from the beach will still be found on the fleet ships and the base, just to keep some consistency.
And don't get me wrong. I'm not suggesting this as an alternative to replace the previously discussed excellent ideas on the "revamped linear" model (especially Senbei's Generic City Zone example.) And truthfully, the bulk of the level would probably be in Acts 1 & 3, since the parts you have to go through no matter who you play as need the variety of multiple routes the most.
But that's just my big pie-in-sky idea. I'll cap off this monster of a post with two issues regarding the actual specific architecture.
I'd like to see less bottomless pits out of laziness, of course, but I'd like to see more climatic stretches of bottomlessness, when the story calls for it (à la Lava Reef Act 2 pre-boss, or Flying Battery Act 2's stretches). But that doesn't mean impending peril has to take a vacation. Remember getting crushed? Yeah, I actually liked that facet. That no matter how many rings I had, I couldn't get too cocky. That's why I was bummed out in Lost World when I saw a row of spikes drop and found out that they didn't kill me. Just your typical lost-ring fare. I'd like to see crushing meaning instantaneous death get re-introduced without getting driven into the ground like bottomless pits did.
(Know what'd be a good segment? Triangle jumping across two walls closing in on you Star Wars dumpster style. They do that yet?)
Also, am I the only one who recognized the potential in that last stretch in Sonic's Sky Deck for that to be akin to the chaotic speed section of Chemical Plant? But it couldn't happen because bumping into the wall slowed you down. (The presence of the worst camerawork in the game didn't help any, either.) Come to think of it, most of the speed sections were either ruined by bumping into the wall or automated with dash panels so you feel like you're just watching a movie of Sonic running fast. How about broadening up the pathways so that Sonic can run on them without bumping into guard rails on a too-narrow straightaway? City Escape had some great moments like this. The only other thing that could help is if you could "drift", like in Riders or the bike riding part of No More Heroes. I have a damn blast driving that thing, and there's really nothing making it interesting other than the drifting. Really, that could be great. B + a horizontal flick of the Wiimote to corner sharply (or a button/joystick direction, since, after all, Sonic games shouldn't have to be Wii exclusive, even if I have a sinking feeling they will be after S06). I think the biggest problem is that they always zoom out whenever Sonic hits a loop, so you can see how cool it looks. Problem is, the directions are always relative to the camera, so this necessitates those awful dash pads. I'd rather see the scenery spin from Sonic's POV at the loss of the 2D experience of the thing, than have my flow be interrupted by a dash pad, after which I know nothing I did up that point any longer has any bearing on my current momentum.
That's all I've got to say about that.
