One of my points in the review is that most of these levels feel disconnected from each other. The bare minimum of "story" I felt was in the lava hubzone with only the first few lava levels. It's important to remember that these experiences should be memorable after playing the game, and I remember those few lava zone levels the most out of all our levels.
We can remedy this by including some important parts of previous levels in the next levels after them to show that you ahead relative to the past levels. Other ways we can address this is to use same sounds (hearing birds in the forest, to eerie sounds in the ritual based levels) and music (shared and fitting theme for those set of levels).
Overall, we need to have a solid guideline outlining steps we take to design levels rather than just leaving it to how we feel like. An example of a guideline for a making a specific level could be:
Identify the theme/story for that set of levels/hub
Think of what level elements/blocks/mechanics you want to introduce for that set of levels/hubs
Make a rough sketch of that level and ensure it fits in with the previous levels (continuation of the previous level, or is this transitioning to a new zone)
Make the level with basic blocks in kog editor (kog_editor) to have the bare minimum level design
Test the level on all 3 difficulties
Use the other editors to improve the design of the levels
In the future, I hope we can have guidelines for 3 things: making levels, designing levels, and reviewing levels
One of my points in the review is that most of these levels feel disconnected from each other. The bare minimum of "story" I felt was in the lava hubzone with only the first few lava levels. It's important to remember that these experiences should be memorable after playing the game, and I remember those few lava zone levels the most out of all our levels.
We can remedy this by including some important parts of previous levels in the next levels after them to show that you ahead relative to the past levels. Other ways we can address this is to use same sounds (hearing birds in the forest, to eerie sounds in the ritual based levels) and music (shared and fitting theme for those set of levels).
Overall, we need to have a solid guideline outlining steps we take to design levels rather than just leaving it to how we feel like. An example of a guideline for a making a specific level could be:
In the future, I hope we can have guidelines for 3 things: making levels, designing levels, and reviewing levels