Fixed Levels vs. Generated Levels
So the good man Daniel Cook has been promoting the idea of generated levels a lot!
His arguments is (simplified) that you open up for endless enjoyment, as players aren’t limited for the handcrafted levels. It should also ease up the development process, and make it easier to try out new thing.
And I think that’s awesome, but I also feel that in some cases it just works better with fixed levels… or at least fixed goals!
Take Mario for example, what if it was never ending? And each time you just did a little better? My guess is it wouldn’t have become such a big success.
Personally I’m very competitive, so when I play a game, I want to win. Even if I don’t I have great fun trying to do so. Games with endless levels don’t usually have a win feature, only a loose feature. So when I’ve had some fun with the game mechanics, and mastered it to some level, I simply quit. That’s why I stopped playing a game like Tripple Town (which is great btw). I simply mastered it. Sure, you can keep fighting to get an awesome highscore, but that’s not really doing it for me. (I also have no friends that matches my skill… maybe I should have played it on G+…)
I just checked – no one played this week, not even DanC! I think that illustrates my point very well! All my friends on G+ who played it probably had a lot of fun, but they will not be enjoying this game forever (even though the mechanics let them).
I also think some part of it is about generated levels usually start from scratch and get more and more difficult the longer you survive. This way your skills are not met with suiting challenges at first, which means you’ll be far away from a state of flow.