oh no people were right today I checked my level and I found 4 additional checkpoints added into to the level. I'm honestly pretty bummed out by this, but I understand [whoever the judge is]'s decision. Hopefully I'll be allowed to buff some of the parts, which, as a result of these additional checkpoints, have become way too easy.
The reason why i'm not too happy about this is that I felt that the individual jumps really weren't that hard. The difficulty came from being able to do them consistently. I might be able to do every jump in 1 or 2 tries, but doing them all in a row is much more challenging. That's, imo, where the challenge in this course lies. It requires the player to take extra precautions, and to be able to do jumps consistently. They'll have to figure out the best methods to approach each jump in order to minimize the randomness involved.
That's at least what I got when trying to verify the level. Now that the bonus checkpoints are added, i'm not sure how I feel about it. Now, all of a sudden, a huge portion of the level which was meant to be a "easier but more to lose" has become just "easy". For example, on the desert section, the 2 towers at the end were meant to be easy, but require good consistently. For the player to be able to maintain focus. Not 1 of those jumps were hard at all. So what happens when they become isolated, is that they become suddenly incredibly easy. Same goes with the end of the upper cave section. None of those jumps were at all hard. The big ladder jump was simply, once again, to make the player act carefully. A ladder is only 2 pixels wide, so one has to take care in lining themselves up. That specific new checkpoint was only 6 easy jumps, and 1 originally had a failsafe as I did acknowledge that it would be frustrating to fail the last jump to a bad tick. For the extra checkpoint in the snowy part, it seems a bit unnecessary, in my opinion. Both difficult jumps in that section were failsafe, and apart from those, there was another 2 linear jumps and 2 unique jumps The addition of that checkpoint has once again reduced the pressure the player experiences when at that stage, which is a big factor in difficulty. Will the player be able to perform basic jumps under pressure? Will they be able to curve smoothly? Will they force momentum or c4.5? Will they jam or jump jam?
The result of these changes is that the difficulty of my level has changed from Insane only to alternating between Insane and Expert. I personally would have nerfed the jumps, or just changed some, as adding checkpoints kinda changes the entire parkour, while nerfing jumps only changes a small bit. I could also buff the small checkpoints, which is what I plan on doing, but this will turn my parkour into a bit of a "Timolia" style course instead of a parkour map. However, I do respect the judges choice to do what they did, and I'm fine with it if they feel that's what's best for this map.
Sorry for sounding a bit rude and entitled here, I just kind of like venting minor frustrations via writing it out????????
