Wonderful game!
I finished the adventure mode, have been enjoying arcade, have started playing around in the editor and have played a lot of user submitted levels! Great game with fantastic opportunities!
And easy to get started with, too!
Which is both a plus -- and a minus.
A lot of the levels in the BSS list are really, really incomplete -- many do not even have an ending. Is there any possibility that some in game reviews (a star system), or a categorization system ("adventure", single level, has ending) could be implemented?
I could imagine that the BSS list will become flooded with both good, but also REALLY bad levels, and could become too chaotic to use.
Yeah, I agree. There needs to be an easy way to rank levels.
Also, I think there should be a favorites feature, so you can save your favorite levels to a separate folder and not have to sift through the BBS list to find them. And that way, they'll always be available, even when the list is updated.
Well, I believe that a download count would help filter that kind of stuff.
Most Downloaded and Most Recent would be really really helpful actually.
Also, there are some really nice levels already, I made one a day ago (its still on process of updating stuff) with tons of custom objects, almost every object is custom actually.
And at the same time, there are some really bad ones with 1 or 2 rooms and without an ending like you said.
Selfpromotion below, sorry I had to :P
You can find its topic here
After I get some vital bugfixing finished, giving the BBS levels more structure is on the top of my list. I would love levels like Wind Quest and Gladiator to be more visible than they are now.
But until then, I've rigged a method for sending arbitrary text and links to the BBS LEVELS menu. So I'll be able to make the first page a "Featured Levels" section & with notes about updating & events etc. It will be like a mini voxel teletext!
The game also already collects data like how long each level has been played for and how many restarts/completes they made. So eventually I'll be able to mine that data (each player can choose to submit) to generate interesting searches and statistics.
Categorisation is also important. My original plan was to keep the in-game BBS list as a collection of 'finished' levels, and relegate wips and experiments to attached images. But I find it's really nice to flip through them in-game, and I like the whole versioning thing people are doing. So I'll put a category radio button selection on the submit page. Same goes for the forum itself -- my plan is to have around 5 sections (chat, support, finished levels, works in progress, models).
Oh, and favourites -- yes. I've earmarked a spot in the user profile file-format for that too. You'll be able to tag a level as either favourite, or 'hide'. You can also filter by these tags. So they should be functionally similar to up and down-votes, but without having to make conscious judgements about if something should be up or downvoted or not.
@zep Fantastic! Right now just running through each level and hoping it's more than a single room with 3 or 4 enemies is... not a reasonable prospect. ;) Glad you already have this in mind, and the data collection stuff you described sounds excellent.
I think your point about categorization is also important. Ideally, I'd love if the ratings were almost more like tags. You could rate a level as Challenging, Suspenseful, Charming, Exciting, etc.
A great model to look at is the "sticker" model they use at www.canv.as You should really check it out if you haven't. It's a forum, and you can rate each post, but not by "liking" them like youtube or facebook. Instead, there are several stickers, and you can choose one to give to a post. So, you can give it a :D sticker for something that's fun, there's a LOL sticker for comedy, a heart sticker for cute posts, a monocle face sticker for intelligent posts, etc.
It's a very simple way to rate content. Sure, you could let each user rate levels with a number 1-10 on 5 different scales, like the ones I mentioned (challenge, charm, excitement, etc). But that's way more than you need. Instead, just let each user rate each level as one of those five categories, and generate its rating from that.
The way I was imagining it, when you finish a BBS level, a rating menu would automatically come up. You could close it if you wanted, or you could click one of several buttons - "Charming, Challenging, Suspenseful, Action, Puzzle", etc.
This method just gives a category, so perhaps there would also be a "like" button next to the categories that you could either click or not. I rambled a lot, but it would actually be a pretty simple way to rate levels.
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