Forum Overview :: Gamerasutra :: Don't people even bother to playtest add-on levels they create?

[quote name="Commander Tansin A. Darcos"]I play a number of the user-created levels people post to the community submissions on Steam for <i>Portal, Portal 2</i> and <i>Thinking With Time Machine</i> (the enhancement added to Portal 2 to add a twist of doing a cooperative playback with yourself). And a number of these add-on levels are downright either non-playable or unwinnable, as if they were done that way <i>on purpose</i>. To me, this seems stupid. You spend a considerable amount of effort and energy to design an add-on level to your favorite game, but the mechanics of that level are such that either the person playing is almost at the end but then cannot complete the level (unwinnable), or the level is so badly designed that they're basically incapable of continuing the level (non-playable) because the level makes it impossible to continue playing because there is no means available to be able to advance past a certain point. Then, almost as bad, are levels that are essentially ultra-tight timing puzzles where you have to set, fix or complete a problem in an extremely short time period. Part of it might be that nobody thinks about the fact that not every person playing has 100% functionality in their hands, and in some cases might have slight problems moving as fast as the level was designed for. This is just as frustrating because I know the game can be played, or won, but I won't be able to do so because the level - or in some cases, the original game itself - has such razor's edge time limits that the margin of error is less than zero; the level or the game cannot be won, or cannot be played, because the mechanics require exact precise precision in such a narrow time frame as to essentially create a level or a game segment with no slack, no give, and no ability to finish. You know, there's nothing that says that add-on levels can't be designed with the option to be just a little bit easier. We had that capability <i>twenty years ago</i> in <i>DOOM</i> when you could indicate when designing an add-on level that a particular monster or power-up was only present at some levels, thus making those levels easier by increasing the power ups, reducing the number of monsters or both. Or increasing the difficulty by doing the opposite. That's usually all that is necessary, reduce the difficulty level of an unnecessarily hard puzzle to allow an alternative with a little less difficulty. I've seen some levels that for what the game is they would have been really great levels, but they were made so unnecessarily hard - what TV Tropes refers to as <a href="http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/NintendoHard">Nintendo Hard</a> - that in some cases (as the picture on the TV Tropes page shows), you might as well as resign yourself to playing a remake of <i><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Wanna_Be_the_Guy">I Wanna Be the Guy</a></i>. I've seen some really good-add on levels where the puzzle was challenging but it was solvable. And I've seen far too many where I think someone just put the level together and never bothered to playtest it to be sure someone with normal ability, and not only hard-core gamers who has perfect reflexes, can complete the level. Or perhaps, it seems, they didn't care if it could be finished and just put it out even though it wasn't winnable or was incapable of being completed. And it's such a waste. ---- "You think you have lag problems? It took Jesus three days to respawn." - Comment added to a ThunderF00t YouTube video <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l9Ju-1I1DTU&feature=iv&src_vid=t6tD_RxtoY0&annotation_id=annotation_3796608659">here</a>.[/quote]