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Trying to make level progression Accessible, but also Engaging

A topic by gscoccola created May 19, 2025 Views: 150 Replies: 2
Viewing posts 1 to 2

Hi, we're working on this free to play game:

https://gscoccola.itch.io/leap-of-faith

It's playable on both PC or mobile, but we're focusing on mobile.

We want to reach a big audience, so not just avid gamers who are used to hard games.

Our main worry is about the level progression, specifically the player accessibility and engagement across the 6 levels.


So if you try our game and quit before the credits, our questions would be:

1) Did you find the game accessible? Where there some unclear mechanics, overly frustrating elements, or steep difficulty spikes?

2) Did you find the game engaging? Did you feel motivated to finish levels and move to the next? Were you bored with the idea before the credits?


Feel free to be brutally honest, harsh criticism is hard to get. Any response is hugely appreciated!

There's some potential here, but I found myself getting a bit annoyed with the concept in the later level's. Getting from point A to point B involves a fair bit of RNG to begin with given spawned items to bounce off of, adding in mortars/shock drones only adds to that, resulting in more arbitrary frustration than amusement. That and the mortars/shock drones seemed a bit out of theme.

The angle i'd suggest would be to lean more into the ridiculous, instead of mortar strikes, why not leap into the pool during the middle of an active hurricane/tornado? That way you could add in theme specific items like wooden planks, cows, or all sorts of things flying around. Or you could even have a scenario of the player jumping off a spire into a pool of lava in hell, or during an alien invasion, city on fire, zombie apocalypse, an atomic blast, into a bottomless void, or *insert ridiculous scenario here*, each with their own unique challenges.

You could also try implementing wind currents to catch to stay in the air, as there are many times when getting between buildings hinges on RNG from a lack of items to bounce off of (watch out for giant planes). Or perhaps kites to grab to provide the player with slow/drift to help wait out the RNG for more favorable items to jump off of?

Thank you for your response! It's good to hear that you reached the final level. The RNG makes it difficult to balance.

Fully agree that the mortars and shock drone are not very imaginative, we struggled to come up with more diverse ideas.

We are definitely working on adding more variety in backgrounds and enemies, and will be definitely leaning into the ridiculous, especially for the final boss we're going to add.

A tornado would be a good background, it would make sense for the falling stuff, we can try to make it understandable in the pixel art.

We also just added a glide powerup (though it requires you to unlock all the achievements).