How to (attempt to) get a proper difficulty curve and sense of progression going in Super Push Adventure

Level design has always been a fascination of mine. Even as a third grader, I drew little road maps of cities, drawing in supermarkets, gas stations, intersections, highways, interstates, back roads, side roads, and so much more on the backs of giant sheets of blueprint paper that my mom brought home for me since she knew how much I loved drawing maps. I even got so excited after playing games like The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past and Mega Man X that I drew dungeons and world maps of my interpretation of Hyrule from my inspiration from Zelda, and side scrolling levels a la Mega Man X.

Now I'm a point where I can make what was a diversion into a lucrative career. Okay. Well, make that a hopefully lucrative career. My first official release came out on March 27th of this year, Super Push Adventure. It's a game where players move through over 80 different levels of obstacle-laden, push puzzle-filled challenges to advance the story and make progress.

There are eight main areas of Super Push Adventure. Think of these like worlds in Super Mario Bros. 3. In that game, there's a grass world that serves as a means to ease players into the game, a giant world with large enemies as the central focus, an ice world with appropriately slippery surfaces, and many more. Super Push Adventure follows the same premise-- having worlds (or in this case areas) that each introduce a central gameplay mechanic or series of mechanics that are the focus of that world.

For instance, much like Grass Land in Super Mario Bros. 3, the first world of Super Push Adventure, Training Grounds, lets players get used and accustomed to the idea of pushing boulders, learning the difference between light and dark boulders, how to fill holes by using boulders, how to restart a level if the current level becomes impossible to solve, and pushing keys into doors to unlock them. No two mechanics are taught in the same level. Thus, I needed to have enough levels per world to teach each mechanic, let the player ease into it and become comfortable with it, all the while keeping a steady progress of introducing new mechanics while giving players time to catch up. Thus, in order to have enough levels to implement new gameplay concepts and mechanics while not having the player get bored with playing in the same area, I chose to have ten levels per world.

Each world in Super Mario Bros. 3 has its own central theme.
Giant Land, appropriately enough, has giant enemies.

Let's look at the second world of Super Push Adventure, Groovy Jungle. Like every area in the game besides the final, which is merely a summation of every other world's mechanics, Groovy Jungle has ten levels in it. What I'd like to do is go through each of the ten levels, explaining how the difficulty curve and sense of progress are built up throughout this world. Let's begin with Groovy Jungle Floor One.

This level's mechanic is borrowed from Training Grounds. Each boulder can only be pushed once. The player has to find the proper path through this maze of dark boulders in order to reach the goal, the green bird you see in the top right.

Keys were introduced in Training Grounds. This level introduces the concept of moving an object out of the way so the player can fill the holes, thus pushing the key into the locked  door to open it, reaching the goal.

This is the first Groovy Jungle exclusive level mechanic. These bananas were left over by some very hungry monkeys. Stepping on one of these sends the player careening in the direction they stepped on the banana. They won't stop until they hit a solid surface, such as these walls. This miniature maze requires the player to find the right path to the goal. 

This next level continues the lesson from the preceding level. It's another maze of bananas where working backwards is key. 

Ah-ha! Now we've found the culprits behind all of those discarded banana peels! The monkeys themselves are harmless to touch, but they can mess up the player by pushing boulders out of their desired place. Through pushing the boulder into the hole to fill it, the player can then push the key into the locked door, hopefully not allowing the monkeys to push the key out of position.

This level turns the premise of the last one upside-down. Whereas the player didn't want the monkeys to push anything, this time it's necessary in order to clear this level. 

This level is a combination of having monkeys avoid pushing boulders and allowing monkeys to push boulders. Which is which? I won't tell!

For these final three levels, I'm only showing a screenshot. The full levels aren't shown. Anyway, this level is a race against time. Can the player outrace the monkey? If he or she doesn't, the monkey will push the boulder the player needs out of position, forcing the player to restart the level. To help beat the monkey in the race are well positioned banana peels to get some extra speed boosts.

This a larger maze of banana peels, requiring the player to use a dark boulder as a means to stop their progress from sliding on a banana peel. It takes some trial and error, but all mazes do, don't they?

This final level of Groovy Jungle is another maze of bananas and this time, monkeys. The way to go is much more obvious, however, but there is still some trial and error to be found here. I couldn't make the final level of the area easier than the others!

So that's just a quick overview of how a general world in Super Push Adventure works. It's important to create a sense of proper pacing so players don't feel too overwhelmed by too many new concepts too quickly, or so bored because you're not introducing enough freshness and ideas at a fast enough pace.

By no means is Super Push Adventure's pacing, difficulty curve, and such perfect. Far from it. But I did try to be cognizant of whether or not each level in a particular world was harder than the last, and whether or not I was doing due diligence in placing new mechanics and gameplay concepts in the game smartly enough.