LIFE IS MEANING(LESS)
Manage the significance of death to the player. Make the player maintain a high level of tension and concentration throughout a certain level, ideally guiding the player to achieve a state of flow.
In a given level, early success does not result in compensatory rewards that could ease the difficulty of the later stages. Instead, the game maintains an increasingly hard challenge. This ensures that the player's tension and concentration are sustained throughout the level, as there's a constant demand for high performance without the safety net of early advantages easing the later challenges.
Pattern Implement
In our level, the player begins with a normal difficulty level. The obstacles in the level gradually increase and so does the difficulty. Once the player plays through the whole 1st level, he will reach the 1st checkpoint of the game. At this point, death is meaningful, as the player needs to come through a long way to reach the first checkpoint.
Starting from here, the rest of the level will become exponentially harder than before and the player will die more often, but at the same time, each platform the player stands on will be a checkpoint, meaning the player can respawn at the last platform they step on after they die, which also means death is meaningless here because the player can respawn from the closest platform. As the level diagram shows below, spikes are placed in a way that the players need to decide which ability they are using before they make an action, to avoid and pass the spikes. Overall, the entire level is challenging in different ways, but still remains the player’s tension throughout the level.
