Climb the Tower: Rethinking the Difficulty Curve with Bite-Sized Levels

It's important to me to ensure that Hop Hop Glide is both easy to learn and difficult to master. On that front, I've struggled to balance levels in such a way that a player always feels challenged without feeling frustrated or overwhelmed.

I realized one of the biggest obstacles is knowing how to organize and combine challenges within a level so that it's one cohesive and engaging experience. To solve this, I decided to break the game down into its raw components and start again... bite-sized.

I added a new mode called Climb the Tower. In this mode, the player instead plays micro puzzles- short 5-10 second puzzles. Once a puzzle is completed, it's totally done, and the player is already off to the next puzzle. Missed a jump? Overshot a dash? Waited too long? That's okay! The player is placed right back into the action to try again, so there's no need to redo anything before the mishap.

This new mode offered me another huge boon when it comes to the difficulty curve. Since the puzzles are micro and completely decoupled from each other, I can drag them around all I want until the difficulty curves out nicely.

I hope to use this as a tool to better understand how to curve out the challenges in Hop Hop Glide, and take the newfound knowledge into adventure mode to use as a reference point for larger-scale levels.