We have never thought that level design can be so hard to balance. As first time game designers, object placement and enemy positioning is vital. Defining difficulty also signify player retainability. After a few reads and topics about level design, we have listed our takes and approach on monster or enemy placements.

1. Mechanic monsters
2. Reward monsters
3. Boss monsters
4. Surpise monsters
5. Story monsters

A difficult monster doesn't mean a challenging game. This is one of our common mistake, we believed that puting hard monsters can put some flavor or interest in our game. It is not how difficult the monster is but how we make players perform our game mechanics.

Placement tells the pacing. Developers can calculate or predict the player's engagement through a properly designed monster placement. Being able to predict the players interaction is vital to maintain player retainability.

A boss monster is a test of mechanics. The position of the boss monster is at the end of each level to test the player's understanding of that mechanics introduced or is availble in such area.

Know your engagement area. Ensure that you have control on the area that the player and the character interacts. This reduces the risk of unexpected bugs due to behaviour glitches.

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An interesting read on what makes a fun platformer game, 11 Tips for making a fun platformer or 13 Tips for making a fun platformer. A quick listed summary is indicated below:

• Keep the user interface simple
• Make important information easy to see
• Mind your collision boundaries
• Make it easy to jump over gaps
• Make it possible to change animation states anytime, anywhere
• Provide plenty of power-ups and collectables
• Write generic, but versatile AI
• Have a story and atmosphere in mind
• Define scope and time clearly
• Prototype before finalising theoretical fun
• Involve everyone in the team in the design

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Last month February we have finalized a couple of items for Pinoypixel website. Catching up the blog post and topics. Created a scirra tutorial about tilemaps. Update the internal Construct 2 game template. Purchased a couple of game assets, to be added in main game template. Other details are listed below.

1. Finalized website.
2. Blog catch-up.
3. Dynamic tilemaps.
4. Game assets.
5. Construct 3 release.

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Projcet Duko is an experimental arrow shooter game. I have also experimented on the dialouge reponse timings, and weapon increments and customization.

• Project Objectives:
  1. Center scrolling, design. Technically the player doesn't change position. The scroll changes from left to right to adjust to enemy view.
  2. Experimented on arrows.
  3. Experimented on dialouges
• Game Features: A .
• Graphics: 16 bit open creative content pixel art.
• Production Time: approximately 24 work hours, on-going production.

Check out the game below, share your thoughts and drop some feedbacks in the scirra arcade comments section.

As mentioned previously Pinoypixel will be using Construct 2+3 on all of this projects. Thus significant updates on Construct 2+3 will be in this site every now and then.

On February 1 Scirra announce the release of Construct 3, which brought alot of suprises and disappointments to most people. Starting with disappointments since the upfront would be is $99 subscription fee, oh well everything falls from that front. The next one would be contesting, since Construct 3 will be running in the browser. Technically I don't find any issues if C3 would be run in the browser. Then a few more complains that I just listed below. The exciting part comes next, first would be the real mobile direct export to apk and ios project. As of this writing the rest of the features are great but barely a wow.

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