Midnight Mansion 3 - your opinion wanted!

[Sharpie]

I like keeping three difficulty settings on a mansion. I still so vividly recall when I first started playing and changing from Easy to Normal and then Normal to Hard being such a jump and taking a lot of time. I never used the easy jumping option but when I first encountered many of those small floaters (in Octopus Mansion) it took me forever to figure out how to do the jump.

I'm not a huge gamer, in fact MM is the only game I really play except for solitaire. Maybe that's why it took me awhile. And to Anthony's comment on his brother, that is one of the nice things about MM is younger players being able to play it.

And as far as a few small mansions to progress, that's fine. But also make sure the new player has enough options and play time to progress. Those of us who are experienced players wouldn't need that but any new players would. So who's the market and do you potentially shut out new players? (Devil's advocate here.)

[Semi-Native]

I like the 3 difficulty levels, too. But it definitely is more interesting when the mansion takes on more rooms and challenges as you progress. Just adding more creatures to the same mansion isn't nearly as fun.

[josephine]

Pretty much agreewith everyone else, it takes several rooms to really get the feel of a mansion. Small mansions seem to make more sense for iPhone play.

[jacobvann]

4B767B4A7C7C7E7C75190 wrote: Jacob, you think that half the players don't see anything beyond Easy?

Well, my point is, the Normal/Hard mansions in MM *now* are based on existing mansions, so the players have

seen

them in some form or another if they play through easy, unlike designing an 80-room mansion specifically for

hard

mode only.

Something I suggested to Vern was the following.  The game map is made up of 4 or 5

regions

(think islands or something), each one with about 8 mansions (maybe 2 large and 3 medium and 3 small).  They start out as

normal

mansions, and when you beat the

boss mansion

for each region, Jack finds some artifact or trinket that, when disturbed, causes on earthquake on that island that changes all of the mansions.  New passages are opened up, new monsters appear, etc.  That way, they become

hard

mansions in an organic way, and you can go back and play them (and they're completely optional) for more treasure and more paths to hidden mansions, etc.

It lets the player progress from Normal to Hard in an organic way, and makes all the hard mansions hard in a very consistent way, and something related to the story of the game.  And, you're essentially doubling the gameplay for one playthrough of the game.

Easy mode

, in this suggestion, is still infinite lives, but still the

normal

and

broken

versions of each mansion during a playthrough.  Either easy players' high scores aren't saved, or they are saved in a separate table as it is handled now.

[triforceguy1]

I was thinking, maybe for easy mode, there could be some sort of hint system rather than just changing the mansions, and maybe there could be some completely different mansions between the two. And hard mode could be unlocked until a certain point and in hard mode there would be much harder mansion to challenge the most experienced players.

BTW - I like Vern's idea of having a sorta map system, kinda reminds me of Super Mario games a bit where you have a choice of which level to go to next

[negative_zero]

maybe you should try making the easier mansions shorter and possibly make them longer based on the difficulty selected?

[Wingy]

That's an idea we used towards to the end of designing the levels in MM2. Two of my mansions are like that -- Mt. Peril Easy is quite short, while the other two get longer and longer. Also Jasperlone Mountains is quite short on easy mode, moderately long in normal and very very long on hard mode. Castle Basano, however, only had a longer version in the hard version.

I'm not sure what the other designers did.

[brell]

TC&TC easy, normal and hard are 80, 90 and 100 rooms respectively.

I like the idea of a mansion that is divided into smaller sections, which get harder as Jack moves on, wiht a saving point and an escape between each section. Reminds me of the Catacombs concept and Freddy's Midnight Mazes and Monsters.

[Alanfalcon]

Something I suggested to Vern was the following.  The game map is made up of 4 or 5

regions

(think islands or something), each one with about 8 mansions (maybe 2 large and 3 medium and 3 small).  They start out as

normal

mansions, and when you beat the

boss mansion

for each region, Jack finds some artifact or trinket that, when disturbed, causes on earthquake on that island that changes all of the mansions.  New passages are opened up, new monsters appear, etc.  That way, they become

hard

mansions in an organic way, and you can go back and play them (and they're completely optional) for more treasure and more paths to hidden mansions, etc.

It lets the player progress from Normal to Hard in an organic way, and makes all the hard mansions hard in a very consistent way, and something related to the story of the game.  And, you're essentially doubling the gameplay for one playthrough of the game.

The problem I foresee with this is that some players just want to jump into

hard

mode straight away, without having to play through normal mansions.  Personally I like to play Normal and Hard modes (and occasionally Easy, just to see what is new and different) but it doesn't seem nice to force all players to play through Normal before they can access Hard.  In fact, I think that may even be a

Twinkie Denial Condition

in the Game Designer's Notebook (Bad Designer!  No Twinkie for you!)

[brell]

Alan has got a point here!