A total of 500 levels - 125 levels in each world : 49 easy levels, 49 hard levels and 27 Time Attack levels - maybe it seems a lot of levels for a first release of a mobile game. But the reason is certainly because we have more experience with PC and console games which propose a full game on their release. Whereas the standart model of mobile games tends to propose a partial content on the release with updates following if the game is a commercial success.
In Bardadum you have a full experience for about 15 hours and certainly more to achieve all the levels in the game.
The level creation wasn't particularly complex but to evaluate their difficulty and sort them was a real challenge.
I put the 3 main testers (Jonathan, Jean-Rémi and Samuel) through hell ! And I'd also like to thanks all the other testers for their precious help.
With the coders, we had to create an analysing tool to gather informations about players experience on each levels (time played, number of try...). So we could have a better overview about the challenge of every single level.
The world 2 in easy mode showed a big difficulty climax, we tried to fix it moving some levels to the hard mode and creating new easier levels.
Finaly, the test sessions, stats analysing and sorting were a lot longer than the levels creation into Ogmo Editor.
After the first world, which is really a tutorial phase, I tried to give their own personality to each level with different kind of puzzles or different architecture choices. It should bring an interesting variety in the game.
Also when people are used to solves the levels, it's interesting to observe the emergence of a kind of connection between the level designer and the player. People start to look at the levels with my own logic... So the players start to think : "Oh gosh, this guy... he really has a twisted mind!"
