Hey Josh, I’ve been following this thread for quite a while and I thought you might like some feedback. For reference, I love your work and love SAB. I am also a fairly skilled jumper (I’ve beaten tribulation mode 1.1, which I also loved).
I want to briefly touch on tribulation mode. It’s awesome. Tricky, creative, lots of fun figuring out where to go, then lots of difficulty actually doing it. I really really love it, and I want to see more content like it. However – it really really really does feel like the Infinite Continue Coin is required. Not an optional quality of live upgrade. If you want to play tribulation mode you need the Infinite Continue Coin – end of story. I know you want to keep the feeling that lives are scarce and tense, but honestly deaths are too unpredictable for this to realistically be the case (hidden lava pits, etc…) and I also ran into a bug where I was on a safe platform client side, but the server thought I’d walked off said platform into spikes servers side – causing my death. These deaths felt cheap and annoying – and they would have been infinitely more so without the Infinite Continue Coin. Just to beat World 1 Zone 1 took me about 200 deaths, or 40 continue coins (if I wasn’t using the infinite). Not impossible to farm, but extraordinarily unpleasant – and not in the fun, IWTBTG way.
My suggestion, although I don’t know how feasible this is, is that after you beat say World 1 in Normal Mode you are given a Tribulation Mode World 1 Infinite Continue Coin as an achievement reward.
Onto other feedback. World 2.1 felt and played great – just the right difficulty level, if not for the bugs. But the bugs were bad. Waterspouts were very tricky, for all the wrong reasons. There was also one point (where you are crossing the river on the moving logs) where when you jump on solid rocks in the river you are swept away anyway. The other problems were that it was simply too long, and there weren’t enough obvious baubles. I know you’ve said that there are plenty of hidden baubles – but they are too well hidden (and tricky to find without a guide). Some semi-obvious 20 baubles need to be added throughout, or else it is too depressing. As for length – the solution to that is to not stick rigidly to the Zone 1, Zone 2, Zone 3 format you have been following. Have six zones a release, and split World 1.1 up into two zones – that would be the perfect length. Also, the rapids were very buggy, unpredictable, and irritating. Generally falling in meant you would either teleport unpredictably about, be flung backwards, or be stuck in the middle of the river until you finally died.
World 2.2 – This world was much much trickier than the previous. World 2.1 felt a little trickier than 1.3, but world 2.2 was a massive difficulty spike. I still beat it without too much difficulty, but I can definitely see how people would struggle hard. The sword assassins have too much health, I’d suggest making them take two hits – their evade is quite irritating as well. I often had to just zerg them out. Some of the jumping towards the start is quite finicky, instead of fun with a little challenge. It was mainly climbing trees that were guilty of this, but there was one part rounding a mountain pillar on ledges that felt the same way. Checkpoints were also too far apart – it generally shouldn’t take you more than a minute (if that) too get back to where you were, any more is just too long. Darts – I like the concept, but (especially in the gong building) they felt cheap, not fun. Again, I’d imagine this would be even worse without the infinite continue coin. Either make them knock back or act as a solid wall (leave the insta-kill for tribulation mode). At the very least add lasers where they aim. Again, it was too long. I’d honestly split up World 2.2 into three smaller levels. Two hours for a first playthrough is too long to not be able to leave the computer.
The gong was (imo) too tricky. I managed to beat it by dying and respawning, not by following it all the way down. You could fix it either by reducing the number of floors you have to go down, or by making it so that you can stay on one side the entire way down. Baubles were also as scarce as in world 2.1. It just isn’t as fun without collecting baubles. Perhaps adding 1/10 of a bauble coins, and scattering them everywhere would help. It’s the sensation of collecting that is awesome, not necessarily getting large amounts.
Not trying to be a backseat game designer, but in my opinion the difficulty level of normal mode should be such that getting through it isn’t even slightly a struggle. It should be a fun romp, with some (optional) challenging side areas for baubles, with the real difficulty in Tribulation Mode.
Haven’t done World 3 yet, so can’t comment there.
As I said before, I really love your work. I hope my feedback help you continue to design great things for GW2 in the future!
