You can Skimp on Level Design

In my travels as a humble hobbyist game developer, I've stumbled upon a curious discovery in the world of level design.

In Arc Roam – Abstract, physics-based 2D platformer/racing browser game, a new round starts on a fresh, never-seen-before level every 5 minutes. This means that there needs to be a lot of levels in the game. In fact, we need to design almost 300 new levels each day!

I couldn't wait to get started – but just to get a quick baseline to compare against, I decided to start with something simple:Math.random() in a for loop.

for(let i = 0; i < 100; i++) {
  polygons.append({
    width: random() * 10 + 1;
    height: random() * 10 + 1;
    x: random() * 100 - 5;
    y: random() * 10 - 5 + 10;
    angle: random() * Math.PI * 2;
    isSlippery = random() < 0.5;
  });
}

To my surprise, the results were pretty good! I've been pleasantly surprised by how passable, and sometimes even exciting, theseMath.random() generated levels turned out to be.

To illustrate what I'm talking about, here are some of my favorite discoveries in Arc Roam so far:

As it it turns out – and this is perhaps the secret of certain classic old-school PC games like Elasto Mania, and more recently, games like Getting Over It – if the physics-based movement scheme is deep and flexible enough, almost any level can be fun to traverse, because the challenge lies in mastering the movement itself, not the level.

Good Level Design™ is still important, even for physics-based traversal games. More sophisticated level generation (and a level editor?!) is coming to Arc Roam eventually – but – for now, I'm quite taken with the happy accidents my simple method keeps throwing up!

Try Arc Roam for yourself here: