A selection of in progress screenshots during the development of desperate dive.

Hey guys, its Tam! I am one of the developers on this Jam, primarily responsible for Game/Level design. The game we decided to settle on was a platformer, due to a multitude of reasons. One of the most important reasons was comfortability and experience. The other developers on this project are either new (like me) or experienced within a narrow skill gap. Just so happens that my only experience with jamming so far has been in platformers, and is the preferred playground for one of the Devs on our team, Dameron, as he loves playing around with movement systems. The second reason why we wanted to make a platformer was to iterate on our previous experience as well. The main critique of the last jam I participated in was that the level design was subpar, undercooked even. 

To get straight into it, one of the most important "lessons" I learned from my previous jam (also my first jam) was that level design is something you shouldn't really skimp on as a developer. This sentiment was shared among the other jammers on the project, especially Dameron as he was also in my previous Jam. With lofty goalpost in view, we decided that the best course of action was to keep our coding light and devote the majority of the team's time to level design.  Keeping the scope of the game to a platformer was a decision made both due to our team size and, especially, our experience as platformers are what we are typically comfortable with.

The discussion about how our game would be distinguished was pretty simple. The team thought, what's the one thing most people would really want to do with a bubble really? Simple, we wanted to pop it. The idea of a bubble is ephemeral really, and it really only exists to pop on itself or to be popped. So, a platformer about popping bubbles.  Maybe we could of done a bubble collect-athon that emphasized interacting and mastering the game's movement, with tight and technical platforming that would demand more and more from the player as our levels progressed. I must admit, I don't like platformers as much as I would like to, they are the one genre of game I find frustrating due to that player impetus to master the game just for the fun of it. However, it's a different story when the game is designed from the ground up to be a speedrunning game, or a game that explicitly urges the player to play as fast as possible. So, what if the team decided to was to have the player race across a stage in order to pop a bubble themselves before it descended to the ground and popped itself. Giving an explicit deadline for the player to reach the goal is a pretty blunt way telling the player to "get good".

Joking aside, there were several initial questions and discussions about how we would design our levels. Would each level be only 15 seconds long? That would limit our level design capabilities more than I would like, especially with the way we wanted to progress the player. The first few levels were simple maps designed to be "tutorial levels" with crude but bold text signs that told the players what mechanics they had access to.  One of the main points of contention was whether or not level verticality was a difficult enough for a player to grasp. Since wall jumping was a primary moving mechanic, verticality was used for that level but in general, the more vertically inclined maps were near the end of the player experience.